Vanishing Point
by notmanos
Summary: PreXMen 1: When Logan's mental blocks start crumbling, he starts wondering what he's doing with the Organization. A dangerous mission where nothing is what it seems convinces him to attempt a risky escape.
1. Part 1

Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine the X Men is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. Bob and his crew are all mine. Hands off.

N.B.: Takes place before the first X-Men movie - and yet, after "Icarus". (Hopefully it'll all make sense .)

* * *

VANISHING POINT

1

16 Years Earlier

The first thing he noticed, after the taste of blood in his mouth, was the heat.

It was humid and sweltering, almost thick enough to touch. It was like someone had thrown a wet sponge over his face, and he was breathing in as much water vapor as warm, stale air. He sat up, a little surprised to find himself splayed out on the carpet, and saw a dead man across the room from him.

It was dark, there were no lights on save for some bleeding in through the louvered blinds, street lights casting slashes of illuminations on the crimson carpet. A ceiling fan spun lethargically over the center of the room, cooling nothing down, just pushing around the sultry air. His chest ached and burned, and he figured the guy must have got in a good shot before he finished the job.

…. What? What the hell was he thinking? What job? Who was this man and why was he dead?

As he struggled to his feet, a small, square object fell out of his pants pocket and hit the floor. It was a computer disc in a clear blue plastic case, and he had some idea that this was what it had all been about. A small silver disc in a case. He picked it up, and examined it for any clues, but the case and the disc were both blank. Any clues on it would have to be found with a computer.

He was remembering … something. His mission was to recover the disc, and to eliminate the man who had stolen it before he could sell it to the highest bidder. His mission now complete, he had to make his way unobtrusively to the extraction point, which was in a back alley seven blocks from here. Which didn't make sense, because how could an alley be an extraction point? And who the hell was he?

He went over to the man's body, just to see if he was really dead. But he knew by smell before sight; the shit and blood and sour smell of the newly deceased, a smell he knew too well. The man's blood had soaked a black circle into the carpet, a large spot that he almost stepped on, but he deftly avoided it because he knew a footprint impression in blood could be telling forensic evidence.

(And how did he know that?)

He was an Asian man of average height and weight, wearing dark slacks and a formerly white dress shirt with rolled up sleeves, and expensive Italian leather shoes. One arm was splayed out towards the right side of the room, and the other was pointing vaguely in his former direction. He couldn't tell what powers he could have had, if he had any.

Why was he thinking about powers? What did that mean?

He left the room, which seemed to be some kind of office space in a large apartment, which was almost completely dark, save for an occasional small light. He wanted to look around, but didn't, because he knew he was running out of time. How he knew that he had no idea, nor had he any idea how he knew he couldn't leave by the front door. Or how he knew that the side window was open in the left side room, the one he had entered through, and he climbed out before suddenly realizing that there was no ledge to step out on. It was a flat, straight drop down about thirty five feet to a dingy, unlit alley , and while he felt a brief spasm of fear, it passed quickly. He could make this jump with no problem - why was he worried? Because some part of him thought it should be impossible to do without breaking his leg?

He stepped out into thin (well, no, it was pretty thick) air and shoved himself off from the window, landing on his feet in the alley below. He almost overbalanced and put a hand out to the wall to steady himself, noticing only then that he was wearing gloves. No wonder his hands were sweaty.

But as an afterthought, he wondered how he got up to the window in the first place if there had been nothing to climb. Looking up, he thought he saw small cuts in the wall leading up to the window, but he didn't understand what that meant. He took off his gloves and shoved them in his pocket, only then realizing that there were little cuts in the leather. Was that related somehow?

He just didn't know. He started walking, sticking to the filthy alley as long as he could, and then, when he had to leave for the street proper, he stuck to the shadows, which lingered in some spots despite the fact that it was the dead of night. Cars warred with cyclos - bicycle taxis - on some streets, and he realized he was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Had he been here before? It almost seemed familiar.

He found the alley that he knew to be the extraction point, but it was a dead end beside a closed noodle shack, and it made no sense at all. How could this be an extraction point? It sure didn't look like he was going anywhere. And the scent of fermenting garbage and piss was strong enough to make him gag.

He leaned against the wall, feeling sweat ooze out of his pores in the dense heat, and tried to think. This was wrong on so many levels, where did he begin? So he killed that man because it was his job, his mission? What did that make him? What kind of a job was that? And what was his name?

Wolverine popped to mind, but that wasn't a name. Who the hell was he? Why did he just kill a man over a disc? And, come to think of it, how did he kill him? He had no weapon, and he didn't see any on the floor. And if the man had hurt him somehow, why didn't he feel it anymore?

He sensed a change in the stultifying air, and he looked at the blocked end of the alley, just in time to see a man emerge from the shadows. He was a tall but slight black man in his early thirties, wearing khaki walking shorts, a pale blue t-shirt , and - for some reason - a pith helmet. Maybe he thought that was funny.

Before he could ask where the hell he had come from, he asked quietly, "Got the disc, Wolverine?"

_What? There was no way in hell that was a proper name. _

The man, who had a slight Spanish accent and was noisily chewing gum that smelled like cinnamon, gave him a quizzical look. "Well? Mission accomplished or what?"

He did know this man, or at least he was familiar somehow. For some reason, he wanted to call him Nomad, even though he knew that wasn't a proper name either. "Yeah, uh, mission accomplished."

"Great, let's get outta this shithole," he said, and grabbed his upper arm. He was going to pull away, break his grip, but suddenly the bottom seemed to drop out of the world, sending his stomach plunging straight into legs (or so it felt like), and then things snapped back into hard focus. But he was no longer in a sweltering Cambodian alley in the dead of night; he and Nomad were suddenly in a metal lined, sterile hallway, the air dryer and twenty degrees cooler, with the distinct, slightly metallic tang of recirculated, treated air. Nomad let his arm go, and he looked around curiously, not sure what just happened, and Nomad started walking towards a door at the far end of the hall. He stopped half way there, and turned to shoot him a scathing look. "Well? You comin' or not?"

He followed after him, if only because he didn't know what else to do. It occurred to him his name might be Logan; that sounded kind of right.

"What's up with you, man?" Nomad asked. "The guy put up a fight or somethin'?"

"Uh, yeah. I think I got hit in the head or something like that. I'm a little out of it."

That made him snort, like he'd just made a joke, but he wasn't sure what was supposed to be so funny about it.

Nomad led him inside what turned out to be a small metal office, where a severe looking man in a tailored suit waited for them, seated behind a dark metal desk. Embedded in the right hand side of the wall were six monitors, four of which had some kind of data on them, but he couldn't quite see it from this angle. The man looked up, and said, "Excellent. How did it go?"

Was he talking to him? It looked that way. "Fine," he lied, and took out the disc, because he was reasonably sure that was what he was supposed to do.

The man took it, looking at it with great interest, and once again repeated, "Excellent. Stryker will be pleased. Nomad, why don't you get Wolverine back to the safe area?" The man's eyes, dark and somewhat empty, glanced his way. "We have you returning to base on a flight at ten hundred thirty hours tomorrow. "

He just shrugged, as he didn't know what else to do. Would this make sense eventually? If not, he would just miss his flight, and he didn't think that was so bad. He wanted to ask why he had to kill the man if he was just supposed to get the disc, but he didn't dare. Who was that man? Why was the disc so important?

The man's look became suddenly scrutinizing, his brow furrowing as he studied his face, and Logan had to swallow back a momentary surge of panic. He knew something was wrong, didn't he? "You look tired, Wolverine. Go get yourself a beer, relax. You did a great job."

"I will, sir, thank you." It was autonomic to call him sir, even though there was something he instantly disliked about the man, something that made his skin crawl.

He left the cool office with Nomad, wiping the sweat off his face with the back of his hand. It had been very hot in Phnom Penh; the level of humidity made him think it would be monsoon time soon enough. (Did he have any idea why he thought that?) He asked, out of curiosity, "Are you heading back to base?"

Nomad shook his head. "Naw, they got me on a couple other missions here. They treat me like a fucking taxi service sometimes. I mean, they got other 'porters - can I help it if I can cover a wider area than most?"

Logan took that as a rhetorical question, and didn't answer. Porter? He meant teleporter, didn't he? That's how he showed up out of nowhere, and brought him back here. He had some idea that Nomad's real name was Javier, and that he had a not so secret addiction to heavy duty painkillers (his constant wide range teleporting hurt him somehow, or so he claimed; it was quite possibly just an excuse). Everybody in the Organization had some secret, something that got them through this without too many nightmares.

Where had _that_ come from?

The "safe area" turned out to be a hotel room in what felt like a different country, or at least it wasn't as warm and humid. Still, it had a semi-tropical theme, with lots of white and seafoam green, billowy panels of sheer cloth for curtains, and a white and gold ceiling fan above that spun even more languidly than that one in the man's apartment. The room smelled powerfully of air condition fed ozone and a lemon scented room cleaner that made him sneeze and threatened to give him a headache. There was a boxy computer on a utilitarian desk, and he asked Javier, "Can I access some Organization files from here?"

He looked quizzically at the computer, as if he wasn't sure what he was asking, and then shrugged. "Sure, I guess so, but nothing classified. Why? Want to file your mission report?"

"Yeah. I don't think I'm gonna get much sleep tonight."

"I got some codeine … except it doesn't work on you, does it?"

"Nope." He had no idea.

"Man, that must be a fuckin' pisser. Guess it's a good thing they kept you in a coma after you were blown to pieces, huh? I can't imagine how much that would'a hurt without drugs."

Was he serious? He just grunted and took off his jacket, tossing it on a near by wicker chair. He felt a brief shift in the room's air pressure, and knew Javier had 'ported out, probably back to Asian continent headquarters.

He was blown to bits? That must have been exaggeration. But even though he felt sticky with his own sweat, and had a feeling - unsupported by any evidence - that he was covered in blood, he sat down at the desk and started to access what he could of the Organization's files.

If he didn't think, if he just sat back and watched, his mind and body seemed to know what to do. It seemed to know you had to access a "blind" website, one that looked like a p.r. page for a business called Mu International (Mu for "mutation"? Probably; not very subtle.) It went through the whole rigmarole, the slickly bland "mission statement" and assorted other paragraphs of business buzzwords that ultimately meant nothing at all, highlighted with generic photos of skyscrapers and anonymous photos of average people in business suits, with no obvious clue of what these people did, where, or why. There was a special page, unlinked by any others, that you could only access by typing in the URL manually; and then you weren't taken to a page, just a pop up, that demanded three different codes. The three codes were changed every forty eight hours, and to even attempt to hack this page was to flirt with an immediate and painful death. He hoped the three codes that popped into his head - a random string of letters, numbers, and symbols - were still accurate.

They must have been, because he was taken to a plain black page, unmarked with any symbols or identifying marks, where a green cursor blinked expectantly. He typed the codename Wolverine, and waited to see if anything happened.

What happened was another pop up, telling him he needed a security clearance of seven or above to continue, and demanded another code. It took him a moment, but the word "Bellerophon" popped into his mind. What did that mean? He didn't know, but he typed it in, and waited to see what happened.

After a moment, a file loaded, featuring a photo of a man on the left side of the page, and a stark recitation of facts in a column on the right. The photo featured a man with a light beard and strange sideburns glaring belligerently at the camera, his eyes hard and angry, and it took him aback for a moment. Was that him? He hadn't glanced in a mirror yet to check, but he had some sense that this was him, and he didn't look happy .. . or very friendly, or sane.

The facts were startling in their general lack of clarity.

Codename: Wolverine

Given Name: N/A, goes by Logan

Date of Birth: N/A, passes for 30.

Place of Birth: N/A

Nationality: Canadian

Education: N/A

Previous Service Record: RCMP and CIC, distinguished service record. Victoria Cross (2), Companion Order of The Bath, George Cross. See also Operations: Lancer, Lighthouse, Nightfall, Halcyon. (Official status, deceased.)

Living Relations: N/A

Special Abilities: Advanced healing factor and highly adaptive immune system. Senses an 8.5 on the Kovacs Scale. Physical vulnerability a 2 on the Ferreira Scale. A 9.6 in hand to hand combat; can operate and use a wide variety of weapons and equipment. Internal blades in both hands. Polyglot. See also Weapon X.

Weaknesses: Severe memory impairment. Vulnerable to telepathy. Emotionally unstable. Paranoid. Has suffered several nervous breakdowns; seems prone to instability , Rage often comes out explosively. Misanthropic tendencies; deep distrust of perceived authority figures, especially male.

Notes: Prone to contrariness and irrational fits of violence. Outbreaks can usually be predicted. Consult Control or Lieutenant General Stryker for availability of operative.

He stared at it for several minutes, not sure any of it made sense. They didn't know his name? "Passes for 30" - what the hell was _that_ supposed to mean? They had to know his name and his age; what kind of government thing could they be if they didn't know him down to whether he dressed left or right? Officially deceased? But he was right here! What the fuck was this!

Then again, it said he was nuts. Nervous breakdowns, memory impairment, fits of violence. So that explained everything, didn't it? He was insane; no wonder he couldn't remember anything. But somebody had to know who he was … right?

Blades in hands. He looked at them for a minute, remembering the cuts in the gloves, but his hands looked normal. It sounded nuts, but he didn't want to check; he was sure it was correct, and he had no desire to see them.

At least there wasn't anything about being blown to bits in here, but there were no files applying to current missions. He tried to search for some of the things mentioned - all those "Operations", Weapon X - but nothing came up with the former, and the latter told him that the file "did not exist". So that meant either he couldn't access Weapon X files, or it was a bogus plant in his records. But why?

Curiosity made him continue searching for anything, as this was deeply unsatisfying. He eventually discovered that Kovacs Scale measured heightened senses, with one being "baseline Human average" to nine being "beyond measurement capabilities". So he was really on the high end of the scale. The Ferreira Scale seemed to measure how vulnerable a person would be to several strangely brutal factors, including hard radiation, direct lethal neurotoxin exposure, and the raw vacuum of space. His rating put him above neurotoxin exposure, but below hard vacuum. How did they know that? How did they test for that?

Did he really want to know?

Further searches turned up nothing he could use, and while he felt a sudden urge to destroy the computer, he let it pass. He didn't want to act like a crazy man, now did he?

He peeled off his clothes and went to take a long, cool shower, during which he thought more about what he'd seen. He assumed he worked for some government or military operation, but when would they work with a crazy person? If he was as fucked up as that record seemed to indicate, why didn't they have him locked up somewhere? If he was that unstable and sick, he shouldn't be on the loose in general, not to mention working for an outfit that had a generous supply of weapons. Unless, of course, his madness worked for them.

He searched his body for bruises and dried blood, and found none. He stared at his skin curiously, trying to figure out what was wrong with it. He had a nagging feeling something was wrong with it, but he couldn't pinpoint it. Maybe that was just his paranoia.

He just got out of the shower and was drying off when the phone rang. For some reason, he didn't want to answer it. But he plodded out, wrapping a towel around his waist, and paused before the nightstand, water dripping from his hair and pattering on the hard plastic phone. He didn't want to pick it up, he had a feeling he wouldn't like what was on the other end of the line, but he did anyways.

There was no preamble, no introduction. Just a silky male voice saying, "Did you find what you were looking for, Wolverine?"

His stomach sunk, turned to ice. He knew this voice, and he didn't like it. "Stryker."

The man didn't acknowledge his name, but his lack of response to it was a kind of an answer in and of itself. "Why were you trying to search your own files?"

He sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering why this man's voice made him equally frightened and angry. "How do you know that?"

He chuckled faintly, and it sounded contemptuous. "We know when anyone accesses anything we have. I thought you knew that." He paused, and it seemed more for dramatic effect than anything else. "Did Phan … say something to you?"

"Phan?" The name seemed vaguely familiar, and then he realized that that was the name of the man he killed. Although he had been curious, it wasn't what he needed right now. Stryker's voice alone was enough to make him feel vaguely queasy - and like he needed to take another shower again. He couldn't possibly get clean enough to wash the slime away. "No, no he didn't."

"Uh huh." Just those two syllables conveyed epic levels of doubt. "Ground Control thought you looked a little … distracted when you turned over the package."

Ground Control? The Asian field team leader, the one he gave the disc - the "package" - to. Different from Control, presumably, if only for the extra word, and the David Bowie song reference. Things were clicking into place in his mind, although he wasn't sure how. Was Stryker's voice enough to trigger some recall? He knew what he should say to get him off his back. "He put up more of a fight than I expected. He had the … package on his person; I needed to secure it before I could proceed with … cancellation." Cancellation - such a cold way to say "murder", like he was nothing but a faulty product line that needed to be stopped before someone got hurt. And for all he knew, it was the truth; his battle with Phan could have gone down exactly that way.

Stryker waited a long moment before he answered. "I see. So why were you looking in your records?"

"My memory fucked up. I'm starting to remember things now … for a moment, I wasn't sure who I was."

"And you know now?"

He swallowed hard, and closed his eyes, not sure why this should be so hard. "I'm Wolverine, an operative for the Organization. " He wanted to add _'And I have a combat rating of 9.6, and I could kick your fat ass'_, but he didn't actually know what a combat rating meant, nor did he know why he hated this man so much. He couldn't even dredge up a mental picture of him.

"Did he use his powers on you?"

"No, he just tried to put a new hole in my head with an MKS." He was dying to ask what Phan's power was, but something was telling him that, of all people, Stryker was the last person in the world to trust. Any sign of weakness, and he would pounce. If he asked him any questions, he would regret it, sooner rather than later. The longer he could keep him in the dark, the better. He didn't even need to convince him he was okay, just not bad enough to worry about.

Stryker made a sort of "hmm" noise, one that sounded as if he wasn't convinced, but maybe he was bored, because he moved on to something else. "When you get to base tomorrow, we'll do a scan, make sure you're back to parameters."

"I'm fine, I've healed already -"

Stryker ignored him. "We're gonna need you in top shape for this next mission, Wolverine, especially now that Inferno's crapped out on us. A squad can survive even if it's down a few members, but if the leader's only got one leg to stand on, they're completely fucked up the ass. If you don't think you can do it, I want you to say so now."

"I can do it." As an afterthought, he added, "Sir."

He grunted an affirmative. "We'll double check that tomorrow. Now, stop dicking around on the computer and get some rest." He then hung up; once again, no foreplay. It seemed rude, but then again, Stryker was, so it fit.

Logan hung up the receiver, feeling like he'd just signed his own death warrant. He supposed he could live with it, if only he knew why .


	2. Part 2

2

He jackknifed awake, gasping for breath as the sweat poured down his body, squeezed from his pores like he was a sodden rag.

His heart pounded savagely in his chest, he could hear the blood thundering in his ears, although for the life of him he couldn't remember what nightmare had just woken him up. As Logan fought to get his breathing under control, to stop gasping it in like a drowning man, he sensed that was it. Not drowning so much as about to. Something - or someone - was holding him under water. He couldn't breathe, and he couldn't fight; he was trapped and helpless, and he needed to breathe - he was paralyzed with the need to breathe.

Logan yanked the sheets off him, a difficult prospect since they were clinging to his sweat soaked skin like a burial shroud, and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to will his heart to slow down. For some reason, he thought he could.

He didn't want to sleep, but he'd been exhausted; his body gave up in spite the general unwillingness of his mind. He wondered if that was just more of the side effects of being hit by Phan. (What _had _Phan done to him?) Through the sheer curtains drawn across the window, he could see the sky turning a pale pink over the Philippines, which is where he decided he was. Right now, he didn't want to get back under water, but he had to have a shower to wash off the sweat, and he tried not to panic under the stream of tepid water. Something in him wanted to.

But as he watched the water swirl down the drain, he remembered somebody - a man; perhaps Stryker? - telling him he was an animal, and he would always be an animal. It was such a curious thing to say, he wondered if it was true.

He looked around the room, and found a plain brown suitcase sitting inside the closet. In it was a change of clothes - worn jeans with a hole in one knee, socks, worn brown leather hiking boots, boxer shorts, a ribbed olive drab tank top, a blue plaid flannel shirt, and a very worn and cracked brown leather jacket. They were all the right size; in fact, judging by smell, they were all his clothes. The Organization thought of everything didn't they?

They were clean, but in spite of the faint soap smell (scent free laundry detergent? How thoughtful), he could still smell himself in them, his own personal pheromones embedded in the fibers, worn by him so long that to take him out of them would require endless washings and dousing in strong perfumes. He got dressed, appreciating the softness of the well worn clothing, and realized the boots and flannel shirt were way too warn for the Philippines this time of year, but figured they'd be just fine for wherever he was going. Either that, or he was supposed to look like he had embraced the "grunge" movement wholeheartedly.

He shrugged the flannel shirt on but didn't button it up, and started shoving his older "mission" clothes in the bag, because he was under the impression that that's what he should do. They would take care of it.

There was a knock at the door, one he didn't expect, but his sudden paranoia was abated by the scent of strong coffee wafting through the door. It was room service with his breakfast, one he didn't order, and yet he wasn't suspicious; it seemed like another example of creepy Organization efficiency. He was disappointed it seemed mostly American, as he would have preferred more traditional Filippino foods, even though he had no ideas what those were, and he wasn't that hungry.

He pick at the scrambled eggs, which were strangely rubbery, but the croissant was actually pretty good. The coffee seemed too punishing to his nose to even attempt to drink, but as soon as he adjusted to the acidic bite of the orange juice, he managed to drink that down. Somehow he knew a roll and some juice wouldn't hold him for long, but he could get something to eat back in the States … or wherever he was going.

Could he just leave? He thought about it, staring out the window at the streets below. He could just walk away. But they would find him, wouldn't they? He couldn't imagine that it would be as easy as walking out the front door and getting lost in a crowd. He had the nagging feeling he had done something like that before, and it didn't work

This was silly. He was an "agent" of some sort, right? A military guy? So why did he feel like he was in prison? He watched people milling about on the sidewalks below, and felt a curious but savage sting of envy.

The air shifted behind him, and he caught a familiar scent that was a mixture of cinnamon, cigarettes, and sweat tinged with just a hint of Vicodin - Javier.

"Ready to go, big guy?" He asked.

Logan just nodded, then turned around, done people watching for the moment. He had no idea why he envied them. He wasn't like them and couldn't ever be like them. Why he had no idea, he just knew that was the truth. He deserved to remain apart, because there was no way he could fit in with them, and did he want to? People did hideous things; they lied, they betrayed, they killed. At least, with the Organization, those things were never personal.

He picked up his coat off the bed, and gave Javier his arm. In a moment, they were standing on a tarmac beneath the bright morning sun, just short of the shadow of what appeared to be a military cargo jet. Yeah, right, did he think he was going out on a commercial flight? Dead men didn't travel first class.

"You okay dude?" Javier wondered. "You look a little … I dunno. Down."

"Didn't sleep well. Breakfast sucked." At least those weren't lies.

Javier shrugged as he shaded his eyes to get a better look at him. "The no tell hotels ain't known for their food. Or accommodations, or much else. They just keep their mouths shut, and what more could you ask for, huh?"

Walking around the plane, he saw a staircase leading up to a currently closed door. He knew it was for him, but for a moment, he did consider asking Javier to "jaunt" him as far away from here as possible. But even as he thought it, he knew that was never going to happen. "Thanks for the lift," he lied, as he headed up the stairs.

"That's the job," he replied casually, and Logan didn't need to turn around to know he was gone. But the thought that maybe he could disappear never left him.

There was no peace for him on the plane, in case he thought he was going to get any. Although there was no one on this flight besides the pilot and co-pilot, the co-pilot came out to give him a dossier. "Stryker wants you to translate these ASAP," he said, putting the sealed envelope in the empty seat beside him. There were ten seats in the back, suggesting that it was a form of passenger vehicle at times. The only bright spot was he found that one of the crates actually being transported contained bottles of gin. He took one back to his seat with him.

For a long time he just stared at the papers in the envelope, not sure what he was supposed to do. It came to him, slowly, each slug of warm gin helping, even though he had yet to feel the alcohol. The pages were part of a decrypted file of a terrorist group that called itself New Dawn. Even though they were based in Brussels (of all places - who'd ever heard of Belgian terrorists? ) the files they had been able to recover and decrypt were in a language no one had ever seen before, and no one had a translation program for. Logan somehow figured out it was a really obscure Arabian dialect spelled mostly phonetically ( how had he known this? He wasn't even sure he knew at the time he figured it out), and since he was the only one who could make heads or tales of it, it fell to him to translate them into something the section leaders could use.

Even though it looked like pure gibberish to him, something in his mind was pulling sense out of it, and he found the tape recorder in the seat pocket ahead of him. He droned out sentences that were mostly fragments, weird bits of code that had probably been mashed together by accident. After all, these were things being salvaged from a destroyed hard drive; they had no guarantees that any of this stuff would ever make sense. But, he had to admit, it passed the time.

This was no normal military jet, either - it was going way too fast. Yet that didn't surprise him either. This probably wasn't a real cargo jet by any sense of the term.

Maybe it was the senseless translation, the warm gin, or both, but he must have dozen off at some point. Because he bolted awake with a scream lodged in his throat, but not quite willing to come out, a projection of fear that wedged in his windpipe. Again, he had more feelings and vague impressions than anything truly concrete, but he thought he remembered seeing ghostly figures over him, looking down, faces distorted just enough to seem wrong, far away enough to seem like mirages, with no bodies to hold them down.

But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like he was looking up through water at someone. No, plural - a man and a woman. With the memory came a feeling - drugged, hazy, like his skin was being burned off with acid. What the hell did that mean? His mind seemed to instinctively shy away from it, and wouldn't let him think about it too hard.

He was up and putting the tape in with the documents when the plane landed, and it seemed like he had followed the sun across the world. It was overcast though, with a heavy fog layer, so he couldn't tell if it was just growing light or just getting dark. But he shrugged on his coat, and went to see where he was now.

He honestly couldn't tell. It was about twenty degrees cooler, though, the air tinged with sea salt and industrial effluviums, and he thought maybe he was somewhere in Northern California, but he had no idea what gave him that impression.

As soon as he touched down on the macadam, he heard an Irish accented voice ask, "Hey you. Miss me?"

He turned to see a woman standing there. She was about his height, with shoulder length red hair and clear blue green eyes that seemed bright with mischief. She wore black pants and black Keds, a joke navy blue t-shirt with a white logo reading "_Ski Mt. Kilimanjaro_", and a blue suede jacket. He did know her, but it took his mouth a moment to catch up with his brain. "Sloane," he said, as she jumped into his arms and squeezed him tightly. He did know her ... were they dating? Maybe they once were; he had the vague impression that they had slept together at some point. But it felt like he hadn't seen her for ages.

"You look fabulous," she said, pulling back to give him a big, crooked grin. She smelled of coffee and cigarettes, bergamot and cherry blossoms. Her scent was familiar, and instantly soothing. "How you feelin'?"

He stared at her a moment, seeing a nagging familiarity in the delicate bones of her face, in the pale hue of her skin, and realized she might tell him some things that Javier would not. He had a feeling he could trust her, at least above the others. "Okay, I guess ... considerin' I was blown to pieces not too long ago."

Her smile faltered, twisted into a slightly pained grimace. "You remember that, huh?"

"Not a lot. Just enough to make me wonder how I survived that."

She slipped out of his embrace, but kept a hold of his arm, almost leaning against him as they walked away from the plane. He was pretty sure she just felt one of his arm muscles, although he had no idea why. Checking to see if he was all there? "You survive a lot of things, Logan, even stuff that maybe you shouldn't."

He glanced at her sidelong, but she was staring out at the fog, lost in thought. What a curious thing that was to say. Was she sorry he survived? Should he be?

To break the awkward silence, he asked, "So where've you been? I haven't seen you for a while."

She brightened visibly, glad for the change of subject. "Oh, I was workin' a problem in Berlin for a while, then they sent me off to Finland."

"Finland? What the hell's in Finland?"

She shrugged. "I have no idea - and I was there. That's pretty bad, isn't it?"

Something random popped into his mind, a song, and he quoted a bit of it. "Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be. Your mountains so lofty, your treetops so tall -"

She laughed, a musical sound that it warmed him to hear, and she gave his arm a gentle slap. "Yer the only guy I know who can quote Monty Python for any occasion. How d'ya do that? I mean, without being a nerd?"

Monty Python? Who the hell was that? He just rolled his shoulders, not a shrug but an amazing impression of one. "It's a gift."

"A secondary mutation," she suggested jokingly.

He played along. "Total Monty Python recall. Really helpful in hostage situations."

That made her laugh again, and he could see that she was steering him subtlety towards a car, a strangely sleek sedan that he suspected was armored - among other things. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, a bit of contact that he didn't mind. In fact, he wanted more; he had some sense memory of her mouth on his, her body soft and warm, surrounding him like a second skin. Did he love her? He wasn't sure.

He saw something in her eyes - wariness, fear - and she slipped away from him, putting a little distance between them. Did something happen between them, something he didn't remember, that put an end to ... well, whatever it was they had? Or did she just not feel the same way about him? She cleared her throat, and said, all humor and lightness gone from her voice, "I'm supposed to get you back to base ASAP. We have an emergency briefing; we may have to deploy to the field right away."

Did she just want to keep this all business then? Fine, that was probably better until he could remember things of more substance. "It's that bad?"

"I don't know the details. But it sounds that way, doesn't it?" She started to walk away, around the car to the driver's seat.

"I did, you know."

"What?"

"Miss you."

That made her freeze, her back stiffening as if in shock. Why had that been the wrong thing to say?

The wind came up then, roaring across the open expanse of the mostly abandoned airstrip, but still he caught her strange reply, a whisper torn away and shredded like so much paper: "I missed you too. I always miss you."

* * *

The base, as far as he could tell, was underneath what appeared to be an aerospace construction plant, and while he could hear noises and smell various things, he wasn't convinced it was still operational, not in any real sense. He saw no one else beside an occasional sullen (and way too muscular) "security" guard once Sloane got them inside. She led him to an elevator that required a code to descend beyond level one - which was odd, because there were no other levels listed, and hey, weren't they on level one? 

But they descended anyways, the elevator doors opening on a large, utilitarian room, where people who looked like soldiers milled around, and others worked at computer monitors displaying things whose significance he couldn't begin to guess. It looked like a small airplane hangar converted into a high tech workplace, and in spite of the harsh illumination of florescent strip lights and the blue glow from computer screens, there was something dark and slightly ominous about the place, like this was a thin façade concealing a medieval dungeon.

Although people looked at them as they went past, absolutely no one met his eyes. Even when he tried to make direct eye contact, their eyes would slide off him like he wasn't really there at all. Were they afraid of them, or were they just part of the scenery, things to be tolerated only when they had to?

Sloane led him to a back room, which looked like a type of conference room, dominated by a circular black plastic table surrounded with maybe a dozen chairs, with some kind of flat screen digital apparatus pointed up towards the ceiling. As they came in, he realized several seats were taken, and a hard faced man in a strangely dignified gray business suit was standing on one side of the room. "Static," the man in the suit said by way of greeting. Right, Sloane's codename. "Wolverine, congratulations on the Cambodian job. Mirage was a truly hard target."

Mirage? Phan had a codename too? Was he … did he used to be one of them?

Someone scoffed, and said, "Our Wolvie's made for hard targets, inne? Oh, and me." The Scottish man who said that was sitting at the end of the table, leaning back in his chair like he hadn't a care in the world. His hair was as red as Sloane's, although he was probably younger, somewhere in his mid to late twenties. He was handsome, but everything about his expression, his posture, his voice, said he knew it; even the tilt of his chin was arrogant. This man he knew - this was Keogh, a/k/a Timebomb. He was a quasi-telekinetic; quasi in that he could only make things burst or blow up, and mainly animate - as opposed to inanimate - objects. He enjoyed going "_Scanners on everybody's arses", _meaning he had a tendency to just cause his opponent's heads to explode. He lacked delicacy as an assassin - he left a holy hell of a mess, ever and always - but if you needed someone taken out as a startling message to others, or lacked an army to take on a squad, he was your man. He could foment mass panic like no one else could. Amazing what blowing up someone's head could do to everyone else around them.

Sitting next to him was a startling young Chinese girl, maybe early twenties if he was being generous, with her long, sleek black hair held back in a tight braid. She glanced at him, and seemed to color slightly as she quickly looked away, bringing a nervous hand to her throat. He couldn't tell if she was afraid of him, ashamed, or both. She was Xia, a/k/a Atomic, and she was very much still a rookie, but her power made the Organization move her up into the main strike unit. Her power was the ability to create an impenetrable force field, one that could even keep out telepaths. She couldn't project the ability, it simply clung to her body like exoskeleton, but when it was "on", she was impervious to all harm, and could bust through everything in her path; her field just wouldn't let her come to harm, and it wouldn't bend to anything.

He took a seat next to Static, not sure what else he should do. Hearing her codename, he remembered what her power was - total interference of any and every kind of transmission, from radio frequencies to telepathic and telekinetic impulses. At full power, she could shut a whole building down, from the telephones to the elevators, and any unlucky teep who happened to be there.

And his power was …? What, didn't he remember his file from yesterday? He healed fast, had blades in his hand, and had a gift for punching things. They were the glamour players, the special, gifted ones, while he was just ground level muscle. That was fine with him - they couldn't all be thrilling - but he had the sudden suspicion that they were understaffed, that key people were missing. There was a woman who should have been here, icily beautiful but distant, a wiry guy who could barely sit still and always seemed to be on a jittery coffee high, and a man who had all the emotional range of a fire hydrant. Inferno, Lightning, and Reaper … right?

Right, those were the codenames his mind churned up. But, wait, hadn't Stryker said on the phone that Inferno had "crapped out" on them? And he had a vague impression that Reaper only showed up for really big jobs, that he was too highly placed in the Organization to even bother with most things. And Lightning ..? Why couldn't he remember what happened to Lightning? Maybe he was busy on another mission, but that didn't sound right …

Control touched something that lowered the light level of the room, and brought the thing in the center of the table to glowing life. "We have solid intell that a new terrorist group in the South American region, calling itself Shining Light, has gotten its hands on an unknown "super weapon" known only by the project codename "Nova". We have very little information on this weapon, we only know that it was stolen in transition from a weapons facility in Middle America four months ago."

"What kinda super weapon are we talking here?" Logan asked, surprised that he was actually speaking. But he felt like he should, that his people deserved as much information as they could get before being engaged in the field. "Nuclear, biological, tactical armament, mutant?"

… "His" people?

(What was Mirage's power?)

He could barely see Control's chiseled face in the dimness, but since he never showed any expression that didn't look like he was on the verge of a psychotic episode while suffering from the most painful bout of constipation ever, that was somewhat irrelevant. "We're not honestly sure, Wolverine, although we believe it's some kind of explosive."

Keogh scoffed again. "Whoopty shit. No doomsday weapon is ever an explosive, unless it can distribute strontium 90 throughout the atmosphere or some kinda shit like that."

"Nova was responsible for the blast that leveled Merrill City, South Dakota."

They were all quiet for a moment, and Logan was glad, because it gave him a chance to search his memory for it. All his mind spat out for him was it was a small mining town, no great shakes, that suddenly just disappeared off the map. It wasn't that there was rubble and bodies - there was fucking _nothing_ left of the town, nothing to prove it had ever existed. Just an extremely large but shallow crater, several miles across. Even the plants and animals were gone, the topsoil; there was a small lake that didn't even leave a puddle.

"So it was an American government project?" Logan finally asked.

"It would seem that way, although officially it's been denied, and covered up well enough that we haven't been able to scrape up a shred of evidence about it."

"Who can hide from us?" Sloane asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

Control didn't answer the question, just looked more uncomfortable. "Static, Wolverine, we want you to leave ASAP for a reconnaissance mission. You will be joined on site by Spectre, who's already in play in the region."

Keogh snorted derisively. "That bloody fuckin' coward. Are you even sure he's been there? And what about Atom and me?"

"There's an emergency situation involving New Dawn developing in Florida. We'll be sending the two of you there to begin with. You will join Wolverine and Static after initial reconnaissance."

Keogh clicked his tongue and sighed, sounding and looking exasperated. "Why send big guns after peons? Shit, we can take those pathetic cunts out and join Wolvie and Irish here on the first flight out."

Control's eyes narrowed, and Logan knew Keogh was on dangerous territory here - you did not question Control's decisions, certainly not in a briefing - but he also knew that Keogh knew this, and couldn't give a shit. He felt a sudden coldness in his stomach, fear for the cocky, infuriating, and slightly psychotic Keogh. You could only push Control so far , and at the end of the day, they were all expendable. "Never underestimate your opponent, Timebomb, or have you forgotten what happened to Lightning?"

Logan saw, out of the corner of his eye, Xia cast a guilty, furtive glance in his direction. What was that? What did that mean?

"Well, that was -" Keogh began, and glanced his way too. What? What were they implying? Did he have something to do with Lightning's death?

(Death! Lightning was _dead_!)

Keogh did something he almost never did: he thought better of something, and decided to actually keep his trap shut.

"Are you through?" Control asked, so coldly there was no way in hell that was a genuine question. Without waiting for a response, Control went on. "You might be called upon to neutralize competition, Wolverine, and you might be targets. We have it on good authority that someone else is after Nova for themselves; someone who has hired the most deadly mercenary available." He pressed a button on the table, and the light display flickered, eventually resolving into the image of a startling women, with blue scaled skin and bright red hair slicked down to her scalp like a skull cap, her yellow eyes exuding a chilling brand of malevolence.

Static groaned as if she had been physically hit. "Mystique."

"The blue assed bitch," Keogh said, with a strange sort of cheerfulness. "I've always wanted to meet a girl with naturally expandable tits."

Control glowered in disapproval. "Do I need to tell any of you how deadly she is? We must assume, if she spots you two first, she will attempt to neutralize you. You must be prepared to take her out first."

"And how do we know her?" Sloane pointed out. "She could be anyone at any time. Is there any way to scan for her specific DNA signature?"

Control's eyes, so dark they looked like nothing but holes in his skull, settled on him, and he could almost feel them like a cold weight on his skin. It was a look that Logan instantly hated, and wanted to squirm out from underneath. "Wolverine, you can find Mystique, can you not?"

For a moment he had no idea what he was talking about, but then it occurred to him almost as an afterthought. "I know her scent." He _did_? So he'd encountered her before? "If she gets near me, no matter what she looks like, I'll know it. She can't change her scent."

"Yeesh," Keogh exclaimed. "Mate, that's just creepy. I bet bus stations are a side trip to hell for ya and that fabulous schnozz o' yours."

Although he didn't appreciate that, he noticed a muscle in Control's jaw starting to twitch - his patience for Keogh was wearing razor thin - and he decided to distract him with what he thought was a relevant question. "Who's Mystique's employer this time?"

"We're not sure, but her last employer was the Russian government. It wouldn't surprise me if they were interested in Nova."

"So we have to get it first," he sighed. This sounded routine and tiring. But better than killing a man over a computer disc any day of the week.

Control turned off the projection and brought up the lights in the room, the cue that the briefing was over. "Wolverine, Static, report to the secondary transit site in twenty minutes. Remember to dress like tourists; your cover is that you're newlyweds on your honeymoon, and Wolverine, remember to pretend you don't speak the language. Full background files will be waiting for you on site. Timebomb, Atomic, I want you at the primary transit point in five minutes. No dicking around."

They all got up out of their seats and headed for the door, but Keogh and Xia went out a second door on the other side of the room, but Xia paused long enough to give him another one of those guilty glances. What was that about?

"Do we have time to get a beer?" he asked Sloane.

She nodded, seemingly liking the idea. "As long as we make it quick, yeah."

"Good. I can use one." And also he thought it might be a good excuse to hash things out before they left.

And maybe, just maybe, find out what happened to Lightning, and whether or not it was all his fault he was dead.


	3. Part 3

3

It was one of those questions that you should have never asked if you really didn't want to know the answer. Logan thought he had, but he was wrong.

Over their beers, Sloane told him how Lightning had died: blown to pieces in the same "incident" that had almost killed him. "According to Xi, you were trying to reach the control center, to abort the self-destruct," she told him, staring morosely into her beer bottle. So Xia was there? Did that explain the looks? "You sent her after Lightning, who was trapped behind blast doors in another part of the base. But the self-destruct went off before you could reach it, and before she could reach him. She survived unharmed - her field, y'know - but … I don't think there was much of Lightning left to pick up. The biggest piece retrieved was part of his leg, I think. And you …" she trailed off, as if the rest of the sentence was self-explanatory. Was it?

"I survived, but barely?"

She nodded, and he thought she shuddered. "You lost … do you remember that part?"

"I'm not sure," he lied. He remembered none of this. "Tell me."

She seemed reluctant, tracing her fingernail in a condensation ring on the scratched oaken table, and he thought she shuddered very faintly. "You … most of your skin was flash burned right off; you were trying to cut the secondary power source when the base detonated, so you were basically sitting on ground zero. You lost most of your right foot, a finger on your left hand, a big chunk of your nose, and at least one kidney. I think there was some other internal injuries, but I don't know them all. I kinda tuned out the litany at that point, y'know?"

He looked at his hand, trying to figure out which finger he'd lost, but he moved them, and they all responded. He could feel them all as well, feel the rough, damp surface of the table beneath his skin. And he was pretty sure he had all his nose. "I look intact to me," he finally admitted, trying to make it a joke. It failed.

"Well, yeah. It all grew back. And believe me, I'm glad -"

"What? What the hell do you mean they grew back? People don't regrow fingers."

She shrugged helplessly, lifting her beer. "You do."

He stared at his hand once more, not quite believing this. Okay, maybe he healed fast, but grew back body parts? No fucking way. "How? Am I part lizard or something?"

That made her grimace, not ready to laugh at such a thing yet. "No. Yer just … you. I think they have somethin' they give you, they add to the tank, that speeds the process up. But I don't know what."

The tank? Was that what he was in? He felt suddenly, immensely disturbed, mainly about himself. What the hell _was_ he anyways?

There was something else bugging him about all this, but he didn't realize what until they were leaving. "Did they ever figure out who double crossed us?"

"What?"

"The base in Kyoto. We were sabotaged, right? They ever find the guilty party?"

Sloane's brow furrowed in consternation as she thought, her eyes staring through him at some internal image. "Now that you mention it, no. Huh. That's kinda weird, isn't it?"

Weird wasn't really the word. But considering how "paranoid" he was, he wasn't sure he could trust himself. Still, his gut was telling him there was something there, something that might give him some answers, if he could just figure out what was the right question to ask.

The secondary transit point was a private airstrip, where what looked like a passenger jet mated with a stealth bomber was waiting for them. The interior cabin was far more cramped than that of the cargo jet (of course), yet plusher, obviously more designed for human habitation. The seats were leather, and there was something that could have been industrial carpeting on the floor, smoke gray and so tightly napped it could have also been a type of compressed floorboard.

There were envelops sitting on two of the seats, and as he picked them up and glanced inside, it suddenly occurred to him: "Where's Stryker?"

Sloane collapsed in a chair across from him, looking slightly confused by his comment. "What d'ya mean? He doesn't come with us on recons."

"When I talked to him on the phone yesterday, he said he was gonna have me scanned, whatever that means. But I didn't see him at the base."

When he said the word 'scanned', her eyes widened; just slightly, and she quickly affected neutrality, but he still caught it. And it was nice to know that being "scanned" was indeed worse than it sounded. "Oh. That whole New Dawn mission came up, and I'm pretty sure Control sent him on ahead to get some intell. I thought I heard some shouting from Control's office before I left to pick you up, so I guess Stryker wasn't happy about it."

"But Control's the boss." It was actually a question, but he made sure it didn't sound like it.

"Hell yeah. There's very little irony in code names."

He tossed her the envelope meant for her, and opened his with great reluctance. "What did he mean by getting scanned? I trust it wasn't a reference to an MRI."

She opened her envelope and looked at the contents, deliberately not meeting his eyes. It was that bad, huh? "I'm sure he meant scan you with one of his telepathic pets, but Shrike's still in the asylum … I think. I didn't see any there, though." The mention of the name Shrike made his stomach clench, like he was preparing for a physical blow. She glanced up at him from under her reddish blonde eyebrows, trying to keep the concern out of her eyes but not quite succeeding. "Logan, you okay? You've been actin' really weird all day, askin' questions about stuff you should know. Is that why Stryker wanted you scanned? Did Mirage get off a good one before … well, y'know."

Could he trust her? His gut told him he could, and it was all he had to go on at the moment. Really, when it came down to it, he had no choice. "Maybe, I'm not sure. What was his power?"

"He had a weird kinda combination of low level telepathy and empathy. He could make you think your worst fear was comin' true. Like, if you were afraid of spiders, he could make you believe you had big hairy ones crawlin' all over you. That's why he was such a hard target - people couldn't get within twenty five feet of him without runnin' away screamin'. But Control figured you'd be perfect to go after him, 'cause what are you afraid of? I've worked with you for years, and even I don't know."

That made him scratch his head as he glanced out the window, the jet beginning its taxi down the runway, the swiftly moving scenery giving him a momentary excuse for evasion. It didn't make sense, did it? On the verge of death, Phan hits him with a big blast of what - fear? That made no sense at all. Something else must have happened. Could someone else have been there? A compatriot who managed to escape before he regained consciousness? That made more sense.

Inside the envelopes were visas, passports, driver's licenses, and credit cards in the names of their new identities, along with a background info sheet. He would be playing Shaun Logan Spencer, age thirty (birthday was Bastille Day, July 14th - that would be easy to remember), a well intentioned environmental activist on vacation with his new wife, Rowena Ann Leigh - Spencer (which led Sloane to exclaim, _"Rowena? What kind of fuckin' dork ass name is that? Somebody did that to wind me up."), _who was also another one of those well intentioned neo-hippy types, who consistently meant well but never actually did anything concrete or worth a damn. While technically better than people who didn't give a damn at all, they seemed to accomplish as much.

"Let's see - I went to grad school, and also hitchhiked across Europe," he read aloud, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with this information. What was he, a method actor?

"We both did," Sloane pointed out. "I guess we went together. I bet I never shaved my armpits once."

"I bet I liked you hairy," he replied, raising his eyebrows in mock sauciness.

She laughed, giving his leg the slightest kick with the toe of her sneaker. "I bet you had long, David Lee Roth hair, and smelled like bong water."

"I bet we slept in youth hostels, and didn't bathe for weeks."

"Eww. So bong water was a general improvement."

"Oh hell yeah. Cologne." He continued looking over the information, and let out a sigh of frustration. "They made me American again. Damn it, I hate that."

"Well, you think that's bad, they made me Irish."

He smirked, unable to help himself. "Stereotyping bastards."

"I know. What, should I wear a rosary and be constantly drunk?"

"Gettin' in bar fights, demanding to know who took your Lucky Charms."

She laughed once more, flashing her teeth, the open expanse of her throat, and the sparkle in her eyes made her look almost painfully young. "See, that's why I like goin' on missions with you. You usually have a sense of humor, unlike those other bastards."

Usually? Did he _really _want to know?

They were hurtling towards South America at an incredible speed; he didn't need to be in the cockpit to know that. There was a sense of G force, something that pressed you back, even if only on a miniscule level. He went to see if there was any booze on this crate, and there was; they actually had some little airplane bottles of liquor, and on her request he grabbed her a couple of bottles of vodka, while he grabbed some whiskey, and some packets of peanuts they actually had as well - he was hungry.

As he scarfed down his peanuts and looked out the window at the pillowy layer of snowy white clouds scudding beneath them at fantastic speeds, he began to wonder if his paranoia was flaring up, or there really was something wrong with this whole set up. Had anything seemed right since he returned from Cambodia? Or even since he returned to his hotel room?

The worst part was he couldn't quite put his finger on the problem. It was shapeless and vague, a boogeyman who lurked in the back of the closet, and yet you knew, even without seeing them, that something was very wrong. The surface set up of this all was fine: they were off to do recon, a little advance scouting, which was always wise when you weren't perfectly sure what you'd be dealing with. But there weren't enough details about the actual mission itself. Was he really supposed to believe the Organization knew _nothing _about this Nova project? These bastards knew everything, especially when it came to dangerous weaponry. They took perverse pride in being able to kill anyone in a myriad of horrible ways, and having the biggest dicks - weapons - on the planet. There was no way anyone could sneak a huge weapons project past them, and certainly not the States - wasn't Stryker their direct liaison to them? Stryker was the ranking American in the Org's secret line up; Control was Canada's top man. He forgot the name of the top Brit, but it probably didn't matter right now. What did matter was that there was no way the American could have snuck a weapons program past Stryker. So what the hell were they really going to South America for?

He had a sick feeling in his gut that he wasn't going to like the answer, no matter what it was.

4

He didn't care what the mission was - he wasn't wearing shorts.

So while Sloane was changing into her "tourist-y" outfit of logo tank top and walking shorts, he remained in his jeans, only putting on his own logo tank top, because, as Sloane said in a way that could have been sarcastic (or maybe not), "All Americans wear ads."

She had to talk him into using the depilatory, though. He offered to shave - Shaun probably wouldn't be quite as hairy as him - but she told him the cream kept him "stubble free" longer, as his hair seemed to grow faster than normal. (Another regeneration thing?) So he smeared the stuff on his face and instantly regretted it; the smell of the stuff made his eyes water like he was crying. It was like someone was repeatedly stabbing his sinus membranes with a sharpened ice pick.

Still, he didn't have to keep it on that long, and he gratefully washed the stuff off, using soap to try and wash the lingering chemical scent out of his skin. At some point he began to suspect the smell - which he could only equate to someone toasting Fritos over an acetate and cat hair fire - was psychosomatic.

He looked at himself in the tiny plastic mirror over the sink, and it was weird to see himself without his sideburns or facial hair; in fact, not just weird, but wrong. He didn't recognize himself. It was like a hollow eyed stranger was staring back at him. But did he ever recognize himself? It was a disturbing thought, but he wasn't sure at all. So he dried his face and left the bathroom before he could ponder its meaning further.

Sloane was waiting for him, dressed in her khaki shorts and blue Addidas tank top, red hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, and she grinned broadly at him, almost but not quite laughing. "Well, hello stranger," she said, coming up to him and grabbing his chin. "Cor, would you look at you! You clean up nice, don't cha?"

He rolled his eyes, and gently removed her hand. The metal of her wedding band felt cold against his skin, and it reminded him of how deeply creepy and disturbing it felt slipping on his own faux wedding band. It almost gave him a sense of déjà vu that made his stomach flip flop. "Yeah, yeah, make fun."

"I'm not making fun! You're a handsome bloke under all that fur. You're a real heartbreaker. See, I always knew it, but you got that whole macho thing goin' on."

"What macho thing?"

She gave him a toothy grin, and a slight nudge to the chest. "Oh, you know. The "I'm all hairy and broody and don't touch me" thing. I always suspected that, under it all, you really were a handsome devil. It's in the eyes, inn't?"

He glowered at her. "Are you through yet?"

She finally did laugh, but it was a sort of knowing chuckle. "Yer embarrassed about it, aren't you? See, the macho thing. You'd rather be ugly."

"At least it would match the inside." Now why the hell had he said that? He'd even shocked the mocking good cheer out of Sloane with that, he could see it draining out of her face like she was losing blood. Why the hell had he said that?

He turned away, and opened an overhead compartment. "So what weapons can you carry exactly?" Inside the compartment was an assortment of small firearms, knives as sharp as scalpels, and assorted other hand weaponry, in case their powers weren't enough. Logan didn't think he'd need any of this, and as a rule he didn't like guns. He preferred things to go hand to hand, because there he had an obvious advantage that was almost insurmountable. And at least you didn't have to worry about collateral damage when you went to fisticuffs.

After a moment, she said, "I think I can fit a paralyzer in these shorts. They have these weird big ass pockets."

He grabbed one of the boxy black things - somehow he just knew that was a "paralyzer" - and handed it to her. "Can you fit it in your boot instead?"

She looked down at her feet and frowned in thought. "No, no room in these hiking boots. Gotta risk the pocket." She looked up to take it from him, and gave him a smile that seemed forced. "I got nothin' to worry about, though, do I? I'm with you. Yer a weapon all by yourself."

He knew she meant that as a compliment. But for some reason, it sent a chill through his body that he felt all the way down to his toes.

* * *

Another hot country, humid and yet arid, the sun glaring down like a punishment, heat rising up from the asphalt as if everyone was being baked in a humongous convection oven. They both wore ubiquitous baseball caps to protect their eyes and continue to promote the gringo image, but it was so hot he wanted to rip it off and risk it. But he didn't, because he was in no mood to argue with Sloane.

The weird American sense of gentrification had taken root down here already. The only way to tell you were South of the border was the prevalence of signs in Spanish and Portuguese on the businesses. Otherwise the city was a thicket of tall spires, skyscrapers that looked bizarrely the same no matter where in the world you were. They walked past a McDonald's and a Pizza Hut on their way to the hotel, which was also a branch of an American hotel chain. The world was actually getting smaller every day, but he didn't find it terribly comforting.

The hotel lobby, done up in faux elegant burgundy and gold, was air conditioned to within an inch of its life. After baking outside, it was like being shoved into a refrigerator, and he actually shuddered until his body adapted to the temperature shift. He was pretty sure they weren't followed, but he still didn't trust a damn thing, and he kept parsing scents, inhaling discreetly and figuring out what he was smelling. He was smelling lots of people, heat baked asphalt, auto exhaust, garbage, piss, bird shit, all the usual scents of urban existence, and inside the lobby of the hotel it mostly faded away to people smell, and the various chemicals use to condition air and clean a hotel.

Sloane clung to his arm and otherwise kept touching him as they signed into the hotel, with the extra officious demeanor of the clerk suggesting that this was the kind of place where they felt if they sucked up to you enough, you'd never notice they were overcharging you. She was good at playing her role of spunky newlywed; she was a method actress. He knew he should be getting into his role more, but he couldn't. He wasn't sure if it was simple lethargy, the heat sapping his strength, or the fact that this honestly stunk to high heaven, but he couldn't quite put his finger on the "why" of it.

Finally they got the key card to their honeymoon suite, and headed for the elevator, carrying their "luggage", which was a rustic backpack and knapsack apiece, keeping with the outdoorsy backpacker back story. But the only thing the bags contained were a change of clothes and some equipment they might need; they could have fit it in the backpacks alone, but no newlyweds would travel that light.

The room was on the seventeenth floor, and it was reasonably generous, with a wide king sized bed and a large bathroom, and an air conditioner already chugging away. It had almost - but not quite - flushed away the scent of faux flowery room freshener, that made him sneeze repeatedly. As soon as he could, he flung himself on the bed, letting his bags fall to the strange copper colored carpet. Sloane looked down at him, curious. "You tired?"

"A little." Better than saying he thought this whole mission was crap.

She paused and he felt her using her power, something like static electricity crawling up his skin and making his hair stand on end. The air conditioner shut off, and everything in the room fell eerily quiet as she did a preliminary scan. After a second, she let up, but the air conditioner still didn't come back on; it would need a manual reboot. "I didn't get a sense of a bug. Did you hear anything?"

"No." If it was a passive relay bug, he wouldn't hear anything, but the good thing about her using her "static" powers was she could take out a passive bug with one of her scanning pulses. It was probably needlessly paranoid, but it was better to scan a new room for surveillance devices than instantly blow your cover.

She walked across the room and turned the air conditioner back on. "You hungry? I'm a bit peckish. Thought I might call room service to bring up some grub. You want somethin'?"

"Sure. Get me whatever you're gettin'. And a beer."

She snickered as she opened the curtain on the far side of the room a crack, letting some more of the sunlight in. Even if there was a sniper on the roof across the way, that side of the room had nothing of interest for them, nothing lethal they could hit. "Give over - I knew about the beer. It's always a beer, inn't? I was getting one for myself as well. Although, I suppose, as newlyweds, we should be getting champagne."

"Not necessarily. That would seem like a pretentiously upper class thing to do to Shaun and Rowena. They do pretentious lower class things."

"Of course."

While she looked over the room menu, he thought about their next move. Technically, they were supposed to act like tourists, look around the city, take pictures and buy useless crap, while surreptitiously doing a little recon. The place they wanted to work their way towards was a former automotive plant on the outside of the city proper; satellite photos had picked up some unusual activity there as of late, and considering it was supposed to be a long abandoned plant, _any_ activity there was pretty suspicious. He also knew that Control was hoping they might pull a tail, get Mystique to follow them, so he could flush her out. Mystique didn't know that he could smell her, or maybe - more likely - she didn't know her scent didn't change when she did. But that still didn't make her any less dangerous … well, to Sloane. He had a vague gut feeling that he'd beat her before, and, while definitely a credible threat, he generally found her to be more annoying than anything else.

And Spectre would be meeting them at some point. The when and where of it was never discussed, but he was the invisible guy; he would find them, and reveal himself when he thought it safe. Or when Logan smelled him, whichever came first.

Sloane called in their order, putting on her perky voice once more, sitting close to him on the edge of the bed. For some reason he reached out and touched her back, letting his hand rest between her shoulder blades. She didn't seem to mind, but he suddenly thought he shouldn't, and pulled his hand away before she hung up the phone. As soon as she did, he asked, "So what happened to us?"

Her spine stiffened, and he knew it had been the wrong thing to ask. She got up and paced to the other side of the room, arms clasped protectively in front of her, and didn't quite look at him as she spoke. "Sorry, love, that was just kind of a … casual thing."

It was all reading between the lines. "I took it more seriously than you did."

"Yeah. I mean, I do technically have a boyfriend, y'know, and I didn't want to … I mean, we have a kinda rocky relationship and -"

"I was a stop gap."

She finally looked at him, frowning. "That's a bit harsh."

"For you or for me?"

Now her expression got uglier, angrier, and he supposed it was a good thing he was out of kicking distance. "Do you _really _want to have this convo now? Do you think I'm the only asshole here?"

"If you were happy with the guy, you wouldn't have cheated. It's not a judgment, it's just the truth, and I'm sure you know it. We're both massively fucked up people, Sloane. Why else are we in the Organization? We go to wonderful, fabulous locations and kill people. That isn't something the well adjusted do."

"And how would you know a -"

She was cut off, undoubtedly in mid insult, by the sudden ring of the telephone on the nightstand. They both shared a startled glance, but what were they worried about? Technically, no one should be calling them, but then again, the Organization always knew where they were. That's why they had the credit cards; it was an easy paper trail to follow, as well as an easy way to keep track of their expenses. Fascistic and yet frighteningly practical.

He shifted closer to the nightstand, enough that he could reach out and snag the receiver. "Yeah?"

He was greeted with a slightly hollow, slightly metallic hum, and after a moment he heard a strange noise, like a strained sniffle. "I'm - 'm sorry I'm calling you, I know I shouldn't …"

The voice was small, high, and strained. He finally recognized it. "Xi?" he asked, sitting up. Sloane gave him a slightly startled look - she shouldn't be calling; this was totally against protocol - but all he could do was shrug. "You really shouldn't be -"

"I know, I know," she sniffed. The hum in the background was a special frequency, so if someone was bugging this conversation, all they'd get would be that noise, a deep, voice obliterating hum. "But I had to talk to someone …" She sobbed, try to swallow it back.

His heart seemed to plummet into his stomach. "What's wrong?"

There was a pause when she tried to pull herself together, but she wasn't doing too well. "They killed him. He's dead."

"Who's dead?" Sloane looked at him sharply.

"Timebomb. He - he was standing there, right next to me … we cleared the threat, I _know_ we did, and yet … the bullet came out of nowhere. Maybe there was a sniper … there must have been, I didn't see anyone …"

"Someone shot and killed Timebomb?" He had to repeat it, because it seemed pretty unbelievable. Timebomb could spill the total contents of your skull on the pavement in the time it took for him to see you. If he could see you, you were dead, no two ways about it. Even Sloane's eyes widened in disbelief, her jaw going slack. If you wanted to kill Timebomb, you had to know exactly how to approach him - which was not at all. You stayed out of sight line, and tried to take him out from a distance. As this person must have done. How much intell did this "New Dawn" have on them?

_(Was New Dawn actually responsible for killing him?)_

"Are you hurt?" he asked her. With her field, it was probably a long shot at best, but she could have dropped it at that point. He had told her to never drop it in the field, even when it looks clear, but she was still a rookie; she still did stupid things. (Didn't they all?)

"No, I still had my field up … I should have included him in it, but I don't like to be that close to him … oh, shit, I have to go." She then hung up, and he figured that, wherever she was calling from, she was about to be discovered by someone.

He dropped the receiver in its cradle, feeling slightly numb. "Who in the hell could kill Keogh?" Sloane exclaimed, sounding honestly puzzled. "That had to be a fucking once in a lifetime shot."

"Yeah." He should have felt something for Keogh, and maybe he did, but only in the most abstract sense. Keogh was a decent weapon, but he was a cocky son of a bitch who thought he knew everything, who thought he was better than everybody. He once bragged that he'd be running the Organization within five years, and he couldn't wait to sack Control.

Control. He remembered that look in his eye at the briefing, the sheer contempt he shot at Keogh from across the table, but then, near the end, it seemed to level out, disappear into his usual cool distain. It was like he knew something that he didn't.

And now Logan thought he knew it too. Keogh wasn't killed by New Dawn. Control had him cancelled. He pulled Keogh and Xia off this mission to send them to a trap.

So if that was a trap for them ….

… what the hell was this?


	4. Part 4

5

He trusted Sloane, he knew he did. So why didn't he want to tell her about this?

He ate his food, barely aware of what he was eating (whatever it was, it was all right, although it was nothing to write home about. The beer was better.

He had to think of a way to do this without endangering Sloane, not until he knew what was going on. He thought he'd figured out a way, but he'd still have to get her to play along at some point. He'd worry about it when they got there.

As soon as they were done eating, and he suggested they hit the town and play tourist, she looked surprised. According to her, he was in "mope" mode, but he told her gruffly he was thinking, which was true, but he didn't admit that there was a bit of moping as well. He thought he had figured it out, except some pieces were missing, and he wasn't sure it made sense.

The reason no culprits had ever been named on the Kyoto mission was because it had been a trap set by their own people, a deliberate "cancellation". The problem here was who was marked for it. Lightning? Most likely, since he was the guy who died. And from what he could remember of the guy, in spite of his code name, he was known for having short bursts of incredible speed. But the emphasis there was "short bursts"; he had a rapid metabolism as well, and became exhausted easily, too exhausted to use his powers. In fact, if he remembered correctly, Lightning's powers were killing him. Although he looked like he was in his late twenties on the outside, on the inside his body was aging and deteriorating at a rapid rate. His own system was using up his body at an incredible rate; he'd have been dead in six months. More likely than not, the Organization decided they didn't want to stretch out the death, and took it into their own hands to speed it up, like they did with Juliet.

(What! What did that mean? Why had he thought that?)

But was he included as a cancellation target? Surely they didn't worry about Xia, as she had her field, and it rendered her indestructible as long as she had it up. Maybe it was a "two -fer": take out Lightning, and get rid of him. But why did they help him recover afterwards if that had been their intention? Because it was inevitable, and they might as well get some use out of him while he was still around? Or was Lightning the only target, and he was unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire? After all, if he was hurt, he would recover. Did he not grow back a finger?

There was no way Static was a target. Not only was she widely liked and not much of a rule breaker (bender? Sure, but she had enough finesse to keep away from the breaking point), but she had a rare and coveted power: telepathic and telekinetic interruption. If you had another teep or teek, it was no big deal, but to have someone who was neither, and yet could tap into their frequency and shut them down cold, that was just … fantastic. And extremely rare and valuable. He couldn't see them ever canceling Sloane. Well, unless she did something really egregiously bad, like kill Control or something. But otherwise she seemed bulletproof. Him? He honestly didn't know. He didn't know much anymore, in fact. Which was just an extra layer of problem to the existing ones. Funny how that worked.

So they hit the town, heading for a big outdoor market that seemed to take up most of a downtown square, and reminded him a bit of the jumble of outdoor stands and hawkers in King's Road, or parts of New York. She shopped, he took pointless and often unfocused pictures, surreptitiously eying and sniffing the crowd for anything familiar, noting how taxis seemed to queue up near the head of the square.

He let this go on for about fifteen minutes, enduring Sloane putting a big floppy hat on his head (not a sombrero - that would have been more dignified), before he leaned in to supposedly give her a kiss, and whispered, "You go South; I'm going to drift North, towards the guy selling the papaya drinks. Give me about five minutes and then head back to the hotel."

She pulled back, looking slightly worried. "What is it?"

He took the hat off, and put it on her head. "Mystique. I want to see if she follows you or me."

Sloane clearly wanted to look around, it was almost a twitch in her neck, but she knew better than that. She was too good of an agent to be caught looking. "What then?"

"Doesn't matter. She follows you, I follow her. She follows me ... good."

"We shouldn't split up."

"Yeah, we should. Leave the blue bitch to me. We're old pals."

She leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek, and after a moment's hesitation, she whispered, "Be careful."

"It may take a while, but don't worry - I just wanna see what info I squeeze outta her. See you back at the hotel."

He wandered off then, getting expertly lost in the milling crowd, going to the kiosk and actually buying one of the papaya drinks as he kept a corner of his eye on Sloane. She wasn't hard to pick out of the crowd, not with her red hair, and after pretending to shop a bit and buying a colorful wrap, she started walking back towards their hotel. He watched her long enough to confirm that she had no tail, no one following her.

And he wouldn't think so. He hadn't smelled Mystique, or anyone familiar. He'd just needed an excuse to do this part alone.

He gulped down the odd but not unpleasant pureed papaya concoction in three gulps, then tossed the empty cup in a garbage can before grabbing the door of a taxi and hopping in. He'd already used the ATM in the hotel lobby to pull cash, not a suspicious activity at all when they were supposed to be shopping, and told the driver in fluent Spanish where he wanted to go. Technically by speaking the language he'd just broken his cover, but since he thought this assignment was a trap anyways, it didn't matter.

He had the driver, a man who could have used either a stronger deodorant or a better air conditioner (or both), take him to the outskirts of the city and wait for him as he walked another block over, and cut through some underbrush and a chain link fence before spying the abandoned automotive factory. He smelled people here all right, many coming and going very recently, but he also smelled ... chemicals? And coca, the building block of cocaine.

He followed the scent of cigarette smoke to a young man, probably no older than nineteen, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, sitting on the abandoned husk of an old, gutted Chevy, an Uzi on a strap slung across his chest as casually as a baby carrier. He snuck up on him quietly, hearing the tinny sounds of music leaking from a single earphone in his right ear. Now, see, that was sloppy guarding; stuff like that could get you killed.

He grabbed the boy from behind and let him see a single claw at eye level. "Tell me what's going on here," he growled in perfect Spanish, "Or I'll cut your eyes out."

He was terribly happy to oblige him. His name was Jorge and he was working off a debt to the Mendoza cartel, guarding their processing plant before a big buy could go down. He really wasn't a big player, or a member of the group at all, and he didn't want to die.

The kid was so scared he reeked like vinegar. He figured he was telling the truth and knocked him out, mostly so he couldn't identify him. Because it was daylight and an abandoned area, he went to have a look himself, just to make sure - it wasn't like they had any decent guards or anything.

And while he spied a couple of guys inside, playing cards and sampling the product, they didn't notice him. Yes, it was what Jorge said it was: a cocaine processing warehouse. It looked like there was at least five kilos of the processed stuff sitting at the end of the plant, awaiting distribution.

Nothing but drugs. Either this was faulty intell, or a deliberate ruse. Or these people got a majority of their funding from drug sales - actually a good bet, as the government did too. But either way, this was a dead end. Only the big guys at the top of the food chain - ones who would never come here - would know about any connection. He had a name at least, but it really wouldn't help him.

He went back to the taxi and asked the driver to take him back into the city, to a decent bar. Not a tourist bar, a gringo bar, but a decent one, somewhere where you could get an actually good beer. Although he seemed dubious, and warned him it might be dangerous for a gringo, he took him to one of the rougher parts of town, the kind not gussied up for tourists, to a bar whose name translated out to "The Lizard's Tail". Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

The interior was dark, stuffy, and reeked of stale beer and old vomit. The bartender was a grizzled old guy with an eye patch and two missing fingers on his left hand. Logan loved it instantly.

There were a few locals in the place who had the look of career drinkers, and they gave him cold stares that were just this shy of hostile, and he stared back, refusing to be cowed, aware that they could just decide to kick his ass whether he stared at them or his shoes. They must have decided he looked like too much trouble or just wasn't the bother of getting up, because they eventually looked away and muttered about him in low tones. Logan took a stool at the end of the bar, threw down some cash, and told the bartender - whom one of the regulars called "Stumpy" (that was pretty logical) - to keep the beers coming. That made the old guy smile, revealing that he'd had three of his front teeth knocked out at some point (rough bar), and comment that the beers were a lot stronger than he was probably used to. He replied, sticking to Spanish, that that's what he was hoping. So he got him a beer. It was kind of tepid and foamy, but at least the glass was clean.

Although he got stares, they left him alone, and he was on beer number three when a strange guy came into the bar. He looked just like every other guy in the place - slightly shorter than average, with a beer paunch belling out the bottom of his thin white cotton shirt, khaki colored pants dirty with what appeared to be road grime, a small moustache like a stain on his upper lip, face like a stubbed out cigarette - but there was something immediately odd about him. First of all, unlike all the other locals, he didn't do a double take, or stare at him; in fact, it looked like he was _avoiding_ looking at him. And when he spoke to the bartender, he seemed to have an unusually flat accent.

Wasn't that funny? Reality conforms to a lie. Even before he caught the scent, he knew who it was: Mystique. It could have been a coincidence, but he doubted it. She'd probably heard about a gringo, and figured it for competition or a tourist - but either way, she was checking it out.

She actually took a stool two down from him, but as soon as she settled in, still not looking at him, he moved down the stools to her, and slapped her hard on the back, like "he" was an old chum. "Hey Pablo, how's the mistica?" He kept his hand on her back, just below the neck, and made a very casual fist. In a sinister whisper, he added, "Think you can morph yourself a new cervical vertebrae?"

She had stiffened at the word mistica - Spanish for Mystique, what else? - but now she chuckled under her breath as she took a sip of her beer. "How's it hangin', pendejo?" He heard her make a noise of disgust in the back of her throat, and put down her beer. "That tastes like piss drained through a dirty sweat sock."

"I know. Amazingly authentic. So, how are we gonna play this?"

She looked at him, and very briefly he saw a flash of yellow behind the dirt brown eyes of the man sitting beside him, and his lips curled up in a smirk. In fact, now that they were close up, he was pretty sure she'd mimicked the look of a bandito in a Clint Eastwood western. For A Few Dollars More? Hang 'Em High? One of those. "I'm not fighting here, Wolverine. We'd probably have to get a tetanus shot afterwards."

He shrugged, and let his hand fall off her back. It wasn't so much that he trusted her that he knew he had the drop on her. "I've been in worse places."

"I'm sure you have. So where's your wild Irish rose?"

"You really think I'm telling you shit?"

"Why not? You've got nothing to lose. I'm done here, I'm on my way out, and not nearly soon enough. I can't believe you Org guys were so late getting in on this. You're usually right there, blocking my view."

"We've been in on this. We got an invisible guy. "

"Really?" She glanced around the bar, and muttered, "As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today … "

" … I wish, I wish he'd stay away," he said, finishing the poem for her. Until she started reciting it, he hadn't realized he knew it. "Don't worry darlin', he ain't here. We haven't met up yet."

"Oh? Is he hiding out in the girl's locker room at the nearest high school?"

"I think that'd be more your style."

She laughed, although she stayed in character and it came out a man's laugh, deep and booming, with just the hint of a feminine lilt to it. "Ah, Wolverine, you could have been a comedian. Your facial hair alone is a riot. How'd you get it off anyways? Blow torch?"

He gave her a tight, hard smile. "I just thought of you, and it all fell out."

She echoed his smile with what he guessed to be mirror precision, then scoped the room surreptitiously. "They're starting to give us the evil eye, gringo. We should talk somewhere else."

"I think we're done here."

"No, trust me, we're not. I have a proposition for you."

He raised an eyebrow at that. "Uh huh. And will you tell me about it before or after you spring the trap?"

She rolled her eyes in a very telling, female way, but only he saw it. "Please, Wolverine, give me a bit more credit than that. Besides, you ain't worth that much on the open market. Nearly everyone thinks you're dead."

He wished that was a surprise, but somehow it wasn't. He felt like he had been dead for a very long time. "The Kyoto thing."

"I heard you blew up real good." She slid off her stool and started sauntering towards the door, only pausing to look back at him. He knew he'd regret it, but what the hell? Maybe he could get that information out of her after all. He gulped down the rest of his beer and followed her out.

Out on the street, she ducked into a dark, piss smelling alley, and morphed into a very convincing replica of Sloane, with a few minor but obvious goofs that suggested she'd only seen Sloane in photographs , and not the most recent ones either. "This better?" she wondered, fluffing out her long red hair. Her Irish accent was better than her Spanish one, but her voice was still a bit too high for Sloane. Then again, that just meant she hadn't heard her talk. Mystique could mimic a voice as easily as a face.

"Hair's wrong."

She pouted, revealing a face too young. Sloane had nascent fine lines in the corners of her eyes when she frowned. "Is it longer or shorter?"

He smiled, not about to tell her one useful thing. "Mohawk."

She glared at him, and for a second there, she did look remarkably like Sloane. "Yeah, I bet you'd like that." Her skin seemed to ripple, going from blue to bronze as she morphed once more, the change coming over her like a sudden wave, crimson hair washing a sudden raven hue as the bones of her face shifted like tectonic plates beneath the earth, lips reddening and swelling ever so slightly as her body became slightly fuller, more curvaceous, and clothes seemed to grow out of her, a loose blue dress not unlike the color of her real skin. He was looking at a young Spanish woman, maybe twenty or so, very pretty, her black hair falling like a veil across the left half of her face. "Well, gringo? What do you think?"

"I think Rita Hayworth wants her look back."

She grinned, flashing perfect white teeth. "Too bad."

Even though he knew he shouldn't, he followed her down the dusty streets and cracked sidewalks until they came to an honestly nice open air plaza, which was - of course - besides a rather large church, and a small footbridge that spanned a narrow length of a lazy river, now rather low due to the heat and a silty brown color, as if deliquescing to mud before their eyes. They stood on the bridge side by side and looked over the railing at the muddy water below, watching bugs buzz its surface, only occasionally coming under attack by camouflaged frogs. There weren't any people about, but there were a couple of chickens scratching and clucking in the courtyard behind them. "What the hell do you want from me, Mystique?"

"I don't want anything from you. But what do you want?"

He sighed, and hung his head like he was about to get the lash. "Are you born again or some such shit?"

That startled a laugh out of her, and while he wasn't a hundred percent sure, he thought it sounded enough like Rita Hayworth to be eerie. "Hardly. But I've been thinking - why the hell am I doing anything to help the homo inferiors? There's more and more of our kind every day, we're the future, and these … backwards animals treat us like we're lepers, or worse. Did you hear about the new law they just enacted in Pakistan?"

"And did you hear that women still aren't allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia? Lots of places indulge in backwards, stupid shit. As long as people allow their leaders to act like morons, they will. There isn't a hell of a lot we can do about complacency, or the domination of the minority by the majority.."

She grabbed his arm, and he reflexively yanked it out of her grasp, not really caring to be touched by her or anyone. Sometimes he just didn't like to be touched, and he wasn't really sure why. She didn't let it bother her. "That's where you're wrong, old man. Unlike the women in Saudi Arabia or the Buddhists in Tibet, we are not powerless. They have a numbers advantage over us for now, but it won't always be that way, And long before that happens, we can turn the tide. Together, with our powers combined towards a common goal, nothing can stop us; nothing can stand in our way. We can make them respect us." Her eyes burned with zealotry, the fire of the true believer, and he couldn't help but snicker. He felt like patting her hand and giving her a dollar to treat herself to an ice cream cone.

"Respect? You can't _make_ anyone respect you; that's given. You can make 'em fear you, though. That's easy."

"And fun too." She wasn't kidding.

Wow - a specist. He knew they existed, but he wasn't sure he'd met one before. He knew Mystique was dangerous - according to Interpol, she was a terrorist wanted in about half of Europe - but this just struck him as plain bizarre. But didn't terrorism and fanaticism go hand in hand? "What's this "we" shit anyways? You join a cult?"

She'd let her eyes go from soft brown to normal yellow; he was the only one around to see it anyways. She gave him a smile that was sharp as a razor, and twice as cold. "We, Wolverine, you and me. Are we not the same? Brothers of the genome . Mutants."

He shook his head and looked down at the shallow water as a quickly retreating frog left a growing ripple on its surface. "We are not the same."

"Are you denying your mutant birthright?"

He rolled his eyes and signed, almost wishing she was a cultist. Hell, he'd settle for Scientologist at this point. "Considerin' I got my ass blown to pieces a couple of months ago, I can hardly deny it, can I? But I have no interest in … well, whatever the hell you're peddlin'. So you can save it for someone who cares, okay?"

She glared at the side of his face, hand on her hip. After a moment, she said, in quiet awe, "You actually think you're a good guy. Say it isn't so, Wolverine."

The fact that she kept calling him by his code name was starting to irritate him, and he wasn't sure why. Then again, he wasn't sure how he knew her, but it was clear that she knew him well enough to not worry about him as a threat either. Funny how they would have that in common. "And what the fuck's that supposed to mean?"

"You're operating under the delusion that the Organization are the good guys." She threw back her head and laughed, a genuine one that seemed to rise from the diaphragm and expand to fill the still air around them, full of genuine humor and bone deep contempt. "Oh man, have they gang banged your brains into pure mush." She fanned herself with her hand, as if the laughing was too much for her.

For some reason, his heart seemed to start racing, doing a marathon inside his chest as he stared at her, wanting to throttle her, to squeeze her neck until her head popped off her neck like a cork. "Nobody's fucked with my head," he snarled. But even as he said it, he knew it was a crazy, blatant lie.

From he look of amused disdain Mystique gave him, she knew it too. "Oh really? So why don't you tell me your name? Where you were born? Hey, where did you go to school? How did your parents take the knowledge of your mutation? Are they still alive?"

Each question felt like a hit. He actually wished she had punched him; it would have hurt less. "Fuck off and die," he snapped, turning and stomping off towards a small copse of trees beside the church. Just the smell of greenery and flowers as sticky sweet as wine was calming; something about the smell of earth was more relaxing than a keg of the strongest beer could ever be, and yet even he knew he was more likely to try and drink his sorrows down than go tree planting.

He knew she was following him, but she waited until they hit the trees before she grabbed him and made him stop, placing herself in the way. It was probably due to the fact that she wanted the coolness and darkness of shade. "Do you want to know the real score, Wolverine? Do want to know what the Organization is _really_ doing while you think you're gallivanting around the world playing good guy?" Fully engulfed in the shade of lemon trees, she changed her shape again, letting the change flow over her like water, the shapely Rita Hayworth clone becoming subsumed by a petite Japanese woman in a sharply tailored business suit, striking but not remarkably beautiful. And yet, he froze. It felt like his stomach had seized up, closing like a hard fist and lodging itself somewhere just below his windpipe, as his blood became liquid nitrogen, and he felt ever so slightly dizzy, like the earth had speeded up and was trying to throw him off its axis. He didn't know who Mystique was supposed to be, but whoever she was … she won. Mystique just won because for some reason, Logan felt completely beaten, his knees threatening to give way and drop him to the dirt. He couldn't speak; he could barely breathe. He felt sucker punched. "Do you want to remember your little piece of sushi … and what they did to her?"


	5. Part 5

Cold shock gave way to a sudden, blinding rage, one that made him feel like he was filling with magma, something hot enough to eat its way through his skin. He grabbed her by her throat and shoved her back into the trunk of the nearest tree, pinning her there as he held his fist up, level with her face. "Don't fuck with me, Mystique," he snarled, his stomach like a lead knot throwing off his center of gravity. "What the fuck do you know about me?"

She grabbed his wrist hard, but couldn't break his grip, not without morphing into something new. She seemed to realize this was too much for him, and shifted back to Rita, but his anger did not diminish. He was seeing red out of the corners of his eyes, like his corneas were bleeding. She got her foot up into his abdomen and kicked him back, hard enough to break his grip, but not hard enough to send him back very far. Still, she held up a hand as she grabbed her throat. "I can't talk if I can't breathe, fucko," she rasped, glaring at him.

He didn't care. He was still so angry everything he heard had an undercurrent to it, a slight but audible roar, a river of blood raging inside his head. He was so angry he was shaking, and he didn't know why. What the fuck had gotten to him so much? "Tell me!" He roared, keeping his fist up, like it was a sword he was going to run her through with if he didn't get an answer he liked. He didn't know what he would do, or what an acceptable answer would sound like.

She looked positively annoyed with him, the unlucky mother of a demanding, unreasonable child. "You are a tool of the oppressors, Logan, an Uncle Tom. You think you've been protecting the world from big bad mutants? Bullshit! At least half of them were never legitimate threats to anyone, not even themselves. You've been killing innocent people, _your_ people, to help the baselines retain their control over us - and their control over you. You're their pet."

"I've never killed anyone who didn't threaten me," he snapped back, not actually certain that was true anymore. He still couldn't figure out what happened between him and Phan, but if fear was the only power he had, there never would have been a contest. "And I'm no one's pet."

"Oh really? Where are you memories, Logan? What were you doing last month? What's your favorite fucking color? Tell me!"

His heart was doing that thing again, skipping and racing, trying to burst through his chest and make a run for it. Mystique was a known terrorist, a liar and a fanatic, a grinning psychopath with a boatload of nearly sensible sounding rationalizations. That's why she was so dangerous. She could twist truth just enough to make down seem like up.

_(So why couldn't he remember when he first encountered her? And what the fuck was his favorite color?)_

The annoyance had disappeared from her eyes, but they were still narrowed in suspicion. "You figured it out, didn't you old man? You knew what they were doing was wrong. But you're just too good at killing mutants, too much of an investment to let go, and - damn me for sayin' it - you knew too goddamn much. So when they finally hunted you down, they just knocked your brains out of your ears, and they keep doing it, 'cause they don't want their big bad weapon to go all AWOL on them again. Do you recover from that too? When they wipe your brains, do you heal faster each time? You know that means that soon you'll leave them no choice."

"Again? What d'ya mean again?" She hesitated to answer, so he closed the distance between them, fist still held up in that awkward pose. But he knew that all he had to do was pop his claws, and with one swipe the top of her skull would go flying; she'd never recover from that. There wasn't a mutant alive he couldn't kill …

… and Mystique had just proved her point. Oh god …

"You escaped them once. You were living under an assumed name in Tokyo; I stumbled upon you during a job. You'd gone native, had a wife."

His heart seemed to free fall into his stomach. "You're lying."

She morphed into the Japanese woman again, and he thought he felt bile rising in his throat. "You know I'm curious. I just had to see who had landed the big bad Wolverine. Frankly, I was a little unimpressed. She didn't look like anything special."

Before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed her and slammed her up against the tree, shaking loose leaves and a couple of unripe fruits. "Don't you ever say that about her," he spat, not even sure who he was referring to. It was all gut instinct, a knee jerk response, just like the fact that the face of this new morph made him want to burst into tears.

There was a noise, the doors of the church opening up, and Mystique had a better angle on things than he did. From the look in her eyes, she didn't like what she saw. "Fuck," she hissed. "Kiss me."

"What?" But that was all he got to say, as she pulled him into a sudden kiss as he heard footsteps coming their way. He resisted at first, but then it occurred to him he wanted to kiss her - not Mystique, her morph. They weren't the same thing at all, but … close enough.

He was vaguely aware the man - it was a man - stopped and looked at them for a moment, before telling them in Spanish to go somewhere else, as this wasn't a place for exhibitionists. They didn't even acknowledge him, just kept kissing, Mystique pulling him into a tighter embrace, like she was trying to crush his ribs.

They waited for another minute after he was gone before they stopped, although he didn't know why. He tried to pull away, suddenly disgusted with himself, with his desire for a woman represented by another woman that he couldn't stand, but Mystique had wrapped one of her legs around his and kept him more or less where he was. "You were getting into that, weren't you?" She said, her grin both smug and mocking. But he felt conflicted, because he was looking at the face of someone he knew he used to love, and someone he wanted so badly it hurt. He knew, if he could just find her, he'd be okay. They could put a bullet in his brain a second later, but that would be fine, because he would have seen her one last time, and she would be alive.

_(She was dead!)_

"Tell me my name," she purred, slipping her arms around him once more. "Come on, lover, what's my name?"

He thought for a moment that she had gone crazy, but then he realized she was asking what "her" name was, the woman's name, the name of his wife. And here he was, helplessly staring her replica in the face, and he could remember nothing; his mind was a perfectly smooth surface, flat and vast, the color of bleached bones. He had nothing; no words came to him, no names. All he had was this feeling that he was dying inside, that something in him was suffering a slow and horrible death.

Again.

6

By the time he got back to the hotel, the sky was starting to turn a velvet orange at the horizon, sunset coming on, the wind turning blessedly cooler even if the heat hardly dissipated. His clothes were sticking to him, sweat making them cling, and he couldn't wait to hop into the shower. Maybe a bath would be better; a nice bath of boric acid, just boil his skin right off.

As soon as he entered their room, Sloane jumped off the bed, spilling crumbs from a bag of potato chips. She was only wearing shorts and a burgundy sports bra, watching the BBC world news feed. "Where the bloody hell have you been?" she demanded, exasperated. "I went back to the market and had a look around again. I thought maybe she'd killed you!"

"Her and what mutant army?" He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the bed, heading to the bathroom. He kicked off his hiking boots before he unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them, leaving them on the floor, and left the bathroom door ajar, because he just knew Sloane was going to follow him in, being irate.

He was right. He was just turning on the taps in the bathtub when he heard her shove it open. "What the fuck happened? Don't give me the silent treatment, you wanker."

He gave her a small shrug as he finished stripping off his clothes, leaving on the blue tiled floor as he stepped into the tub full of tepid water and sank into it. It wasn't quite tepid enough; he was still sweating. "I'm not. I'm just tired."

She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, waiting impatiently. "Well?"

"The automotive factory is a dead end. It's a drug processing plant for the Mendoza cartel. If it has anything to do with Nova, it's purely financial."

"She told you that?"

There was no harm in lying. "Yeah. And I checked it out. Nothing but cocaine and lazy guards."

"Did she say where we should look for Nova?"

He scrubbed the water into his hair, letting it trail down his neck. The shampoo the hotel provided was too flowery, so he figured he'd just use the soap to wash the sweat and bar smell out of his hair. It didn't smell that great either, but it was better than the shampoo. "It's underground, beneath an old army base about twenty klicks from here. As soon as I clean up we can head out."

"What do you mean head out? That'll be breaking the mission profile."

"The mission profile doesn't matter." He stuck his head under the still roaring tap, not just wetting his hair but drowning out noise, even that of her voice. He'd been unable to name the woman, and Mystique said she'd never bothered to learn it, she only caught a glimpse of the woman. Also, she said she was murdered, and she heard the Organization did it prior to them bringing him back into the fold. An agent of theirs couldn't have any outside ties, any family to hold them back. He kept reminding himself that Mystique would say anything to turn him against the Organization, but he knew that the woman - his wife; his poor, nameless wife - was dead. He could feel it, a hollow pit gouged out of his insides, something cold and gaping, a wound that never closed. How had he never noticed it before?

_(They took her from him. Even if they didn't kill her, they took his memories of her away, all he had left.)_

When he raised his head, he heard the words she was saying. " - ter? Of course it matters. Unless … what did she tell you exactly?"

He decided to just make something up. It wasn't like she could check. "The group that has Nova is preparing to move. Someone tipped them off about us. If we want any chance at this, we have to move ASAP."

"Who tipped them off?"

He snorted, rubbing his soap lathered hands through his hair. "How the hell should I know? It could've been her for all I know. She wasn't surprised to see me."

"Shit." Sloane was now actually in the bathroom now, probably for the purpose of shouting at him when his head was ducked under the water. She sat up on the edge of the sink, and stared down at the floor as she considered their options. "Get anything else out of her?"

"Nothing important, except the group she was working with had no interest in acquiring Nova. She was just here gathering some intell on it, and knowing her, probably computer files." He rinsed the soap out of his hair, and wondered why he couldn't think of her name. What purpose was there in taking her away from him if she was already dead?

When he raised his head, Sloane asked, "Did you kill her?"

"No, no point. She didn't fight me; she knew she wouldn't win." Not physically, but she did fight him and win psychologically, didn't she? She knew something he didn't, and used that knowledge to break him. It now made him wonder if Phan did find something to use against him. Maybe his enemies had weapons fashioned from his own past, an inborn weakness courtesy of the Organization. What did they want from him? Hadn't he given them enough? They had him, they had his life - were his memories necessary too? How much did you give until you couldn't give anymore?

He noticed Sloane looking at him curiously out of the corner of his eye. He soaped up his arms for no other reason than to avoid looking at her, but this was a pointless exercise. He wasn't going to be clean; he would never be clean. He could peel his skin completely off, and he would still be stained. "Somethin' wrong, Logan?"

"No. Why do you ask?"

"You just … I dunno. I guess you kinda look sad."

"I just wanna get this over with. I'm tired of spending all this time in humid countries." And, if this was a trap for him, he began to wonder if he had any reason at all to avoid it. It might be easier if he just walked in, eyes wide open, and accepted the bullet.

It wasn't like he had anything to live for anyways.

7

Sloane wanted to call in back up since their mission was compromised, but he didn't see the point. They needed to move fast, and he wasn't sure there was any back up that could get here in time. Still, she did it anyways, and he went out and used his claws to wedge open a locked car in the hotel parking lot and hotwire it. He went ahead and ripped the license plates off, so if the cops actually did get called tonight and bothered to look for it, a plate trace would do no good. But it was unlikely that the police would mount a search tonight, or anytime soon; this was one of the top five car theft capitals in South America. Chop shops employed as many people as the coffee shops.

He brought the car around front and Sloane hopped in with one of the backpacks, now heavy with equipment. As he drove them out towards the old army base, she started checking weapons, making sure they were loaded and the safeties were off, and put a Browning Hi-Power Mark III beside him. "You prefer those, right?"

He glanced down at the gun, at the black polymer body, and wondered if he put a bullet in his head through his eye, would it kill him. Would it be enough? Or would he need to have a good angle, to make sure the bullet tore up as much of his brain as it could as it caromed around his skull like a loose pinball? There was no way he could recover from that, was there?

She slammed a full clip in the Glock she had chosen for herself, and wondered, "Did Mystique give you any estimate on the people there? How many Shining Light morons we'll be dealing with?"

"Would you trust any number she gave me?"

She dipped her head, agreeing with that point. "Yeah, but should we trust a damn thing she said?"

"Technically no, but our initial intell was shit. Someone oughta tell Control he needs better inside men. First Keogh, now this."

"What do you mean? Keogh's death was just a horrible chance occurrence, not an intelligence failure."

He made himself nod, because he couldn't mouth the lie. He didn't believe that. If she wanted to believe that, if that let her sleep through the night, okay, but he couldn't pretend. Keogh was knowing his place less and less, and he was probably preparing to make a move; he was cut down by his own, pure and simple. By someone on Stryker's personal squad - that would explain the yelling that Sloane heard. Stryker wanted to stay and take care of Wolverine, but Control was more concerned about Keogh, and Control made the call on who was more of a risk. Stryker disagreed, but at the end of the day, he wasn't the ultimate boss, and Control wasn't about to allow a mutant freak who threatened his dominance to exist any second longer than necessary. Logan was no threat to Control; but Stryker was worried about himself. Why? The name did cause that dyspeptic feeling, though, so Logan just assumed they had a bad history - a bad history he didn't remember. What a coincidence. He bet Stryker didn't want him to remember either.

How did he do this? How did he go on pretending that he didn't know that he couldn't trust these people? He couldn't do this anymore. Better to die than to try and keep living a lie - somebody else's lie.

"How're we gonna do this?" she asked.

"Let's go with scenario gamma."

"Not gamma. Why do you get all the fun?"

"You can come up after me." Gamma had him scouting ahead, to get a general idea of their surface opposition, while she blocked comms and cut power. He also did a lot of "neutralizing", a nice word for general slaughter and mayhem. That way, if they wanted to close a trap on him, Sloane would never be in danger.

The city gave way to slums that were little more than shanty towns, then small and rough looking factories where people worked for wages little better than slave, and then everything became rolling hills and fields of brown and green, with gnarled looking trees fading to copses that could have come from a John Constable painting.

"You sure you're okay?" Sloane wondered. "You seem awfully quiet."

He shrugged. "Nothin' to say." What was her name? Why couldn't he think of her name? And why couldn't he quite remember her face, even though Mystique had been her hours before? It was like they put something in his head that wouldn't _let_ him remember her … but that was impossible, right?

No, it wasn't. Behold the wonders of the modern age, when you could invade another person's mind and rearrange the furniture, so it didn't seem like their mind at all anymore. Where you could kill a guy with knives that came out of your body, and where a woman could block your telephone line just by thinking about it. Nothing was impossible; it was only a matter of degrees.

He pulled the car quietly over to the soft shoulder of a road that was mostly dirt, and killed the engine. "It's over the next hill," he told her. It was traditional to do scouting on foot, if you didn't have access to a remote viewer, a teleported, or a flyer.

She nodded, and rummaged in the backpack. "I'll see if the scanner can get a count before I kill everythin' electrical."

"You do that." She got out of the car and he just sat there a minute, listening to the engine tick. The opening of the door had let in a night scent of jasmine and hay, clover and mouse shit, and it was strangely comforting. Yet, while he was sitting there, both doors closed, a new scent made itself aware to him. It was … where was it coming from?

It was coming from nowhere; it was something his mind had churned up, a scent memory. It was the smell of clean skin, with hints of musk and tea, vanilla and cinnamon, a woman's smell.

And he knew. He knew right then that they couldn't take that away from him. They could fuck with his mind, but they couldn't take away his scents, the catalogue memory of smells he had accumulated in a place beyond the reach of most telepaths. And if he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could almost feel her skin, soft and warm, beneath his fingers. They couldn't touch his sense memories, just his actual ones. He didn't know her name, his mind refused to give up her face, but he _knew_ her; he had her smell. Just like he had Mystique's, even though he had no idea when he'd ever encountered her before. His senses, powerful and annoying as they often were, also gave him something they never really realized, something they couldn't take away without compromising him: total recall. Even when his mind gave him nothing, he still had her scent.

In the darkness behind his eyes, he saw something, a little spark that flared to life, and he could feel it deep inside the hollow pit in his chest. Now that he knew he had something of her, it sparked a terrible yet empowering knowledge. Not all was lost. He could rebuild from this, from here. He had something they could never take away from him. It felt like he'd won something, had a small victory, although it was nothing of the sort.

How could they be so stupid? Even in normal people, the olfactory senses were powerful memory triggers. Did it never occur to them that it would be even more true for a man with "super" senses? For god's sake, they _used_ him for his sensory abilities - they should have known. Did they think fucking his mind up was enough? Maybe it was for a while, but eventually the scent would come back to him. If they couldn't permanently erase it, it would always be there, waiting to surface again.

Maybe it had before. Maybe that's why they had to keep doing this to him again and again and again. Mystique had been right about that; eventually they would have no choice. Eventually he would prove too costly to keep, and he would be cancelled. Maybe that's what was happening tonight.

Sloane opened his door and leaned in. "Scanners are picking up shit. They have some kinda scrambler preventing just about every reading you can name. The only thing we could use would be sonar."

He nodded, and she moved back as he slid out from the driver's side. "I'll just hafta go in cold."

"Good thing you like it that way, huh?" She gave him an encouraging little grin, but it faltered and faded quickly. She touched his arm gently, but he quickly stepped back, out of reach. He didn't want to be touched right now, at least not by her. It made her frown, though. "What's wrong with you? You seem so off tonight."

"I've just been thinking. Do you think we've ever done any good?"

She raised her eyebrows slightly in surprise. "What? What d'ya mean?"

"For the world, for mutants, for others. Have we ever done any good in the Organization? Has anything ever changed?"

Now her eyes seemed to harden, as if she was now positive he was crazy. "What? Of course it has. What did Mystique say to you? Was she fillin' you full of propaganda shit?"

He shook his head, and looked towards the crest of the hill. There was the faintest haze of light rising from it, illumination from the base at the bottom of its valley. It would soon be prematurely and inexplicably dark. "I wouldn't trust her as far as I could sling the Eiffel Tower. I've just been tryin' to figure out, if we're the good guys, why doesn't anything ever change? Nothing does, Sloane. There seems to be a new terrorist group every five minutes, all built on the ruins of others we supposedly wiped out. It's almost like we're helpin' create _more _of them."

Her frown had become a scowl, and she looked pissed off. "Don't you give me that shit. We've done real good, Logan. It's just the world is full of shitheads, ain't it? Hell, you _told _me that!"

He nodded. He didn't remember telling her that, but it sounded like something he might say. "Yeah, but things aren't any better for mutants, are they? People hate and fear them even more. And look what we're doing."

"And what the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Our mission objective. We reacquire a stolen doomsday weapon - and take it for ourselves, the Organization. Just like these Shining Light guys took it for themselves. It's like we're government sponsored terrorists, only, since our government is Western, we're supposedly the good guys. But do you really think Stryker is a good guy? Or Control? What do you think they're gonna do with Nova?"

There was a small frown line between her brows, echoing the shape of her mouth. "They're gonna destroy it, that's what."

He couldn't help but chuckle and shake his head. "You're not that naïve, Sloane. C'mon."

She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, giving him a death stare that was belligerent and hot enough to be warming. "Do you know what they would do to you if they heard you saying this?"

"And that's certainly a good guy thing to do, isn't it? Act like the Stassi?" She turned away in disgust, so he asked her something he needed to know: "Do you know what they did to me?"

She froze, spine stiffening in surprise. She hesitated before she began, "Logan … I know it seems funny … but after Kyoto -"

"Save it," he interrupted, figuring he had her answer - yes. She knew; they probably all knew. And they abided it for reasons all their own, beyond whatever the official reason was, because no one was dumb enough to buy the party line. Maybe they all accepted it because it was better him than them. "Give me forty seconds, then shut them down. Wait another two minutes, then follow me in." He headed off, up the hill, without waiting for an acknowledgement.

"Wait, what about your gun?"

"I don't need it." He paused and looked back at her. In the pale light of the cold moon, she looked ghostly, an apparition of a past best left forgotten. "One more thing. What's your favorite color?"

Now she was staring at him like he was insane. When they got back to headquarters, she'd probably report his "erratic" behavior. "What? Green, I guess. Why?"

"No reason." He started trudging up the hill again, feeling a sort of freedom in his steely resolve.

He was not dying tonight. Trap or no trap, it didn't matter. He had found his reason to go on, his purpose for living.

Revenge.


	6. Part 6

He was almost within the base's outer perimeter when the power died. Sloane just turned on her power and their lights, radios, and equipment all suffered a sudden, catastrophic failure. He used a claw to quietly slice through the analog locking mechanism holding the gate closed, which was all they had now that the power was gone. They probably had multiple failsafes on it, but with Sloane around, it was a joke.

He was racing quietly across the ground, closing the distance, as the guard's voices floated around him in the darkness. Their distress grew as they realized their flashlights weren't working, which made no sense at all, and they figured out they were probably under mutant attack as he grabbed the nearest guard and punched him beneath his left ear, a sort of "soft spot" that generally put people down for a long time. He was trying to take them out quietly, so as not to alert the others, but by the time he elbowed the next guard in the face hard enough to break bones, the others heard, and started to panic.

Someone started firing randomly into the dark, hitting some of his fellow guards, and the bright muzzle flashes were kind of distracting. The scent of these men, now increased by their fear, were like neon tracers in the dark. He knew where each one was, what they were doing, how scared they were. He counted twenty, all probably local; none smelled familiar. Even their gun oil was different than the kind the Organization used. They were the lure of the trap, fish in a barrel waiting to be skewered. The real trap was inside, waiting for him.

There was no challenge at all for him here. By the time Sloane had joined him, the lights coming up slowly as she approached and eased up, the radios on the fallen men crackling to life, voices reporting there was a power interruption to the main gate and main doors, and asking if everything was all right up there. He picked up a radio off the unconscious man at his feet, and replied in Spanish that everything was okay up here, but who was fucking around down there? The guy had no answer for him, beyond an "unexpected glitch in the system", but at least they were on the defensive, which meant it didn't occur to them to ask who the fuck he was.

Sloane pulled a camouflage vest off one of the unconscious guys and put it on over her bullet proof vest, and also took his automatic weapon and khaki baseball cap, donning them as she looked down disparagingly at the guards laying in pools of blood. "Just think - if you made more noise, they could have all shot themselves."

"Where's the fun in that?" He found a key card on one of the dead guards and pulled it off him, ignoring the blood splatters as he headed to what looked like a bunker with a steel plated door. This was all routine, so common he could have done it in his sleep. He slid the card in the lock, and the light went from red to green as it unlocked and started to slide open. He stood to one side, while Sloane stood on the other, cradling the automatic rifle like it was a pet. As soon as the door was half way open, he nodded at her, and her eyes clouded over white as she turned the power off, freezing the door and plunging the interior into darkness. He slid inside, listening to confusion and smelling fear, a hunter who didn't need eyes to see his prey.

Much like the outer compound, there was no challenge for him in here, and even less men. When Sloane brought the power up, they glanced around at their surroundings, which were depressingly pedestrian. A mostly empty bunker with a table and a few chairs, and five bodies scattered across the floor.

Across the way was a locked door with another one of those key card locks, and it was simple enough to get it to open, revealing a starkly utilitarian elevator. There were no buttons inside it, nothing to say how many floors were below, or where they'd be ending up, but he expected that too. No surprises here. Maybe it was to lull them into a false sense of security?

As the lift started its downward plunge, Sloane studied his profile with an intensity that was unnerving. "What's wrong, Logan? You usually get into this kinda thing more."

"Told you, I'm tired." And he was; he was tired of all of his, tired of his life. Was this really all he was good for, all he could do? Was he just muscle? If he was married once, maybe he used to be something more.

"Uh ... huh. We're perfectly certain you can't ever get sick, right?"

"Stop the elevator."

"What?"

"The power, kill it," he told her, crouching down to the floor and popping his claws.

She did, with great reluctance, the lights in the lift dying a slow and audible death as the lift ground to a halt. "Is something wrong?"

"Yeah. I don't want to announce our arrival." He jammed his claws through the metal floor, and started cutting. It was pretty thick, but not good enough to survive adamantium. "I'm goin' down the shaft, openin' the doors from the inside. Give me two minutes after I leave, then come on down."

"But ... if i'm not there to kill the power, they'll see you."

"Let 'em. It won't do 'em any good." They would be expecting Sloane killing the power to be their arrival signature. It was time to mix it up, throw them off their game. Maybe throw off their trap too, if he was right.

He cut a semi-circle in the floor, just wide enough for him to squeeze through, and bent back the rest of it, until he had opened a hatch in the floor. "Why are you changing our attack pattern?" Sloane sounded suspicious, the way she did when she guessed he wasn't telling her everything.

"'Cause sometimes you need to, and this has been too easy by far." It was just enough truth to let him skate by, and as it was, he took the opportunity to lower himself down the hole, grabbing the elevator cable before he could get a good grip on the wall of the shaft.

It was pitch black, of course, but he could still make out some details on the wall, changes in texture and pattern, and he knew he had her stop it just in time; it was about a floor down to the end of the road. If he was sure he wouldn't make too much noise on impact, he would have let himself drop.

But he climbed down like a good little boy, and listened hard, placing his ears to the still shut elevator doors, taking a deep breath and trying to parse the scents beyond it. If there were people waiting for them it wasn't apparent; maybe they intended to move just as soon as the power died, or the trap was actually deeper within the base. Either way, he didn't care to find out.

He crouched low, out of the range of traditional gunfire, and used a claw to break the seam of the door, wedging it open. He moved before his eyes even adjusted to the low light levels down here, and was surprised to find himself in an empty foyer, the walls a dark, dirty metal that seemed to be rusting as he watched.

The lights were odd; they smelled odd. They were ten inch strip lights placed about two feet apart, six feet high, and they smelled like phosphorus and burning carbon. He placed his hand on one, and suddenly knew why. The light, a marginal yellowish white, was cool to the touch. It wasn't an electric light, but a chemical one. They were all chemical ones.

Fuck. They were ready for Sloane. What did they have in store for him?

He didn't wait for her. He crept farther down the corridor, which conveniently only led in one direction, and something about this place made his stomach cramp up, tie itself in knots. He hadn't been here before, but ... this place was familiar. The layout, perhaps, the materials it was built with. He didn't like it at all.

He smelled a guard before he reached the bend in the corridor. He was clearly a smoker, even though he didn't have a cigarette going now. He may as well have, though, because he reeked like an ashtray.

He also smelled like Organization gun oil.

All in all, it was too easy. He grabbed him from behind, a hand over his mouth, and before he could even react, he punched a claw right through his spine. It wasn't necessarily fatal, although he would be effectively paralyzed until he could get reconstructive surgery.

The man sagged in his grasp, and he pulled him around the corner, propping him up against the wall like he'd just sat down for an impromptu nap. The guy had nicotine gum in his pocket, so Logan used that to jam the barrel of his automatic rifle. If someone picked it up and tried to use it, it would blow up in their face.

If the guy was conscious, he would have asked him for details on the trap, but he was already out. Maybe he severed more nerves than he meant to.

Not that it mattered. He went on, creeping down the hall, quiet enough to pass for a rat. They would expect him to come rushing to the attack, sweeping out of the Sloane created darkness like an unleashed wolf, so that's why he decided stealth was the better option. He wouldn't act like they expected him to; he wouldn't live up to their expectations. He just hoped Sloane, not being a target, would be okay.

He came to a door on the left side wall, solid metal with a viewing slit almost six feet up, and when he glanced inside, he saw nothing but a nine by nine dirt cell, with a lumpy mattress on the floor. Were they waiting to put someone in there? Surely not him; he was pretty sure he could cut through this door.

That's when he realized he smelled someone, someone ... familiar. The problem was, he couldn't recall the complete scent, couldn't slap a name on it.

"Hey," a voice said out of the nothingness, his tone rushed and whispered. Since he smelled someone it didn't totally surprise him, but when the guy seemed to materialize out of the emptiness of the cell and come walking right to the door, it was a little startling.

He was a Japanese man, young, maybe early twenties, black hair unkempt like he'd been fighting or sleeping - or both. Looking at him, Logan realized this was Jayson, a/k/a Specter, the invisible guy. "Get me out of here, will you?" Jayson asked, trying not to sound desperate. "I think they're gonna do somethin', and I _really_ don't want to be here when it goes down."

Although he moved his hand to where the lock was, he hesitated to pop his claws. "What do you mean do something?"

Jayson grimaced, clearly not wanting to discuss this right now. "Look, I'm not sure, pull the plug, something, but this Nova thing is really unstable. I mean, I know why the Org gave it up, okay? Even these guys can't control it, and I know they've been tryin'."

He stared at him for several seconds that felt like an eternity. "What? I thought these guys stole it from the American government."

"Huh? Hell no, dude. From what I've overheard, they had an arrangement with the Org to try and stabilize the thing, in return for a piece of the action. But they can't, and things have gotten worse, and you have _got_ to get me the fuck outta here before everything blows up."

Was Jayson meant to die here too? As Keogh had pointed out, he wasn't the bravest man in the world. Spying he was good at, but he really didn't like to fight.

He popped his claws and cut through the lock as he realized this all made a terrible kind of sense. It was why he hadn't been swarmed by guards and mowed down with automatic weapons fire: there was no one here. Oh sure, guards on the surface to make it look good, but down here a mere skeleton crew of completely expendable people. Nova was the real trap; Nova would kill him.

He hardly had to give the door a nudge before Jayson scrambled out, just as Sloane turned the corner and joined them. "Where is everybody? What's going on?"

He turned to face her, and told her honestly, "I'm sorry."

Her brows furrowed in continued confusion. "Sorry about what?"

He gave her a quick, sharp punch to the temple, just hard enough to knock her out without giving her a concussion or a skull fracture (hopefully). He caught her falling body before it hit the ground, and Jayson gawped at him in abject shock. "What the fuck did you do that for?"

"Get her out of here." Jayson probably wasn't strong enough to carry her, so he propped her up against him, draping one of her arms across his shoulders. He looked equally startled and annoyed. "Go. We have a car parked on the other side of the hill. Get there if you can."

"But what about you?" It was an automatic question. He was pretty sure Jayson didn't really care.

"I'm gonna do what I'm supposed to do: take care of Nova."

The kid scoffed disparagingly, struggling under Sloane's meager weight. "Didn't you hear me? It's unstable; it's probably gonna go off any second."

"I know." With that, he left the confused Jayson and unconscious Sloane behind as he ventured further into the dark complex. Jayson might have started to say something - Logan's best guess was "Hey" - but Jayson didn't try to say or do anything more. One of the few things he could count on in this life was Specter would leave a dangerous area at the first given opportunity. But that was cool - at least he knew his limitations. Sloane would have followed him, no matter how forcefully he ordered her to stay behind, so he hoped she forgave him for that punch. Or at least didn't hate him.

Dark hallways curved down into darker places, making him feel like he was walking into Hell, and he began to smell something unusual but unsettlingly familiar. Chemicals and organic scents, drugs, that were familiar enough to make his skin crawl, but not quite something he could put a specific name to.

He finally came to a large steel door, but it had no lock on it, and as he approached it opened, releasing even more of that eerie chemical scent. As he came inside, he saw he was in a large laboratory that looked like it could have belonged to Doctor Frankenstein. The circular room was dominated by a huge vat of greenish fluid in which something - a person - floated, with thick cables like arteries trailing away from it, feeding into unknown pipes, while rather industrial looking monitors flush with the side walls tracked vital signs and what seemed to be energy levels; he could feel the power bouncing off the walls like microwaves.

There was a man he didn't recognize in what looked to be a kind of doctor's smock, checking the readouts from a terminal on the far side of the room, and when Logan came in, he turned to look at him. Surprise made hi s face blanch - what? Was he expecting a noisier warning? - and he pulled out a pistol and fired.

The bullet hit him in the chest, but it struck a rib and ricocheted off into one of the nearby panels. Logan just glowered at the man, stalking towards him. He fired again, and this time the bullet missed a bone, but passed harmlessly through a fleshy part of his forearm. The doctor seemed even more shocked that none of this was coming close to stopping him. "Run," he snarled, figuring if the guy tried to take one more shot, he'd feed him the pistol and jam it in his duodenum.

The guy finally got the hint, dropped the gun, and ran for it, escaping out a side door. Part of Logan wanted to go after him; it would take less than a minute to catch up with him, even less time to smash his skull into paste. But he couldn't leave someone like this.

He walked around the tank and started ripping out cables, cutting through thicker ones, making sparks vomit up in brief, violent bursts. He got angrier as he attacked them, and ended up slashing control panels, kicking them until consoles broke into a dozen jagged pieces. He didn't know why he was so angry until he realized how he recognized that smell - that was the same stuff they put in his tank, whenever they slapped him in one.

He was so angry he wasn't so much breathing as panting, gulping in air like a man going down for the third time, and he forced himself to stop, to try and calm down. It wasn't easy; it felt like his body was fighting itself, his rage a beast all its own. But he forced himself to take deep breaths through his nose, calm his breathing, and by extension calm his rage. It worked a little, but just barely.

When he was sure he had control of himself, he approached the tank. "Can you hear me?"

He could see why Jayson kept referring to it as a thing, not a he or a she; it was impossible to tell. Floating naked in the ichor green water was what could be called a rough approximation of a general humanoid. It was perhaps five feet tall, with waxy looking skin that wasn't pale so much as it was translucent - you could clearly see the dark striations of veins and capillaries running throughout their slight body, see the regular contraction of a dark object that could only be the heart deep inside its chest.

The person had no hair at all, on their strangely smooth, round head or anywhere on their body, and while the general lack of height and lack of external genitalia made him think it was probably a female, the lack of any secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts or even nipples (none of those - the chest was perfectly featureless, and almost concave), seemed to suggest otherwise. Nova wasn't a he or she, an adult or a child; Nova was a neutral, something dwelling in between the known and the unknown, one of those mutations so extreme they could never pass for normal, not in a million years.

As he looked down into the tank, it opened its eyes. They were large and colorless, the pupils as white as marble, little capillaries of blood visible at the edges, an irregular rim of red. For a second they just stared at each other, and finally Nova sat up, smooth translucent hands gripping the sides of the coffin like vat. "Why do you want to kill me?" It had a voice like ringing crystal, neither male nor female, almost not human.

The very question was shocking. "I don't want to kill you." Is that what the Organization had told it? He was a crazed killer, coming after them?

As much as he could read its oddly placid face, he thought he saw some surprise. Also, something was starting to glow beneath its skin, almost like phosphorescent lichen, and he could feel his skin prickle in response. The energy it was giving off was extraordinary and strange. Could it kill him? Quite likely, yes; it could burn him to dust. If he'd come charging in here on the attack, it probably would have killed him without bothering to ask any questions. After all, he would have confirmed that he was a bloodthirsty maniac. "Then why are you here?"

"Because the Organization wants you to kill me."

Now it jerked its head back as if he'd punched it. "What? I'm not a killer … not on purpose …"

Logan shook his head and walked away, putting some distance between himself and Nova, in case he was making it nervous. It was becoming so bright it was hard to look at it directly. The light didn't seem to fade, though, and he suspected Jayson was right about the thing not being able to control itself. "I think I know what you are. You're what the wags in the upper levels dub the "opies" - the overpowered mutants." Lightning had been one of those, hadn't he? That was what doomed him.

"Overpowered? Meaning what?"

"Meaning your power is too extreme for your body to handle. Either your powers eventually get beyond your control, they inadvertently kill you, or both. Every now and then, evolution fucks up. Look at the platypus."

Nova made a noise that sounded like a chime. Logan could only look at it from the corner of his eye. It was now glowing as brightly as a mythical angel, and for the first time in this cool, dank underground pit, he was starting to sweat. "I see. I'm dying, I know I am. They told me they weren't sure why, but they thought they could save me."

"I'm sure they tried. But there's limits to what can be done."

"Yes." He heard water splashing, saw it getting out of the tank, or at least the glow of it did. His eyes just couldn't adjust to light, or it was going up in intensity every second. Either way, it wasn't good. "I don't understand what's going on. They said you would kill me, and yet you say they said I would kill you?"

"They didn't say it, but that was their intention. This is a type of operation known as a "nex" - no exit. We kill each other, mutually assured destruction, and they can sleep at night, not worrying about you accidentally making a town disappear, and not worrying about me breaking down and trying to escape again."

"I didn't mean to … the town, I didn't …"

"It's okay, kid. I don't care. It doesn't matter now."

"So what happens next?"

Logan sighed, and rubbed his dry eyes. They felt like he'd been staring at the sun for hours without blinking. Nova wouldn't just kill him, it would obliterate this entire complex. No wonder Jayson was so scared. "I don't know. Do you think you can control it?"

"Control what? My powers?"

"Yes. Long enough to leave?"

There was another one of those pauses that was thick, but filled with a faint but audible hum. Did it have a body made of glass? It seemed to have a low harmonic frequency, or at least its powers did. It was almost oddly beautiful, like alien music. "I don't understand."

It said that a lot, didn't it? "I'm letting you go. If you can leave, do it now. If you're going to die, at least enjoy your freedom while you have it. There's no reason to die cooped up in this fucking cellar."

The humming continued, a comforting oscillation of sound. "And what happens to you?"

He shrugged, and almost scoffed at the idea. "Leaving sounds like a grand idea to me too. I can go to ground, see how long I last this time. If I can make it to the Amazon, I can get lost there real easily. I know forest environments, I can survive there like they can't." And how did he come to that conclusion? It just felt like something truthful.

"They'll kill you."

"They'll try. I don't give them that much credit."

Another pause. Logan noted that something was starting to drip down on the far side of the room, and from the smell alone he realized that plastic was melting, insulation turning liquid over the place where Nova currently stood. "Aren't you scared?"

Maybe he was wrong about Nova. Maybe it was a child. "They can't hurt me any more than they've already hurt me. I'm dead. I can hardly get deader."

"But you're not dead."

"As good as. I have nothing to lose; they made sure of that."

"You talk like they're the enemy."

He shook his head and started walking towards the door. "Friends don't do this to you, Nova."

He had reached the door when it said in its haunting, ethereal voice, "I used to be able to transport myself from place to place just by thinking about it. I could think of the space station, and I would be there; I could think of the Grand Canyon, and I would be there. Anywhere in the world, or above it; I had no limitations, and distance was irrelevant. I felt no strain. But then things started to go … wrong. I'm not even sure when I noticed it and really paid attention to it; I figured it was just a spasm of some kind, a hiccup. When the Organization approached me about helping my country, I was happy to, but I couldn't conceal my problems for long. They gave me something that they thought would help me, an implant, and we were testing the limits one day. Do you know what happened?"

Was there a point to this story? Maybe it just wanted to talk. God knew how long it had been in that tank, waiting for him to show up and kill it. "Let me guess - this test was in Merrill City, wasn't it?"

The humming briefly rose a pitch, then fell. "Yes. I intended to wish myself elsewhere, and instead, I wished the town away. They said it wasn't an accident … but I wonder. All I can do is hurt other things now. I never wanted that."

He nodded in understanding. "Yeah, I know the feeling."

"I wish I could go, but I can't. So you'll have to do it for me."

"What?" he reflexively turned back, but had to shield his eyes. Even then, it didn't help much. This was why its code name was Nova. It was a sun in the middle of the room, too intense to be looked upon by Human eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I hope you live long enough to set this right. Someone has to. This can't be all there is to life, can it?"

The humming grew louder, a crystal vibrating so violently it was about to break, reaching a pitch so high he grabbed his ears and winced, the light punching through his eyelids like wet rice paper, showing him the bloody lines of his own veins and capillaries inside his eyelids. The light seemed to stab through his optic nerves, punch into his brain, and burn through the soft tissue like lasers.

He was roughly sure he was screaming even though he couldn't hear himself over the hum; the pain was unlike anything he'd ever experienced before, acid poured on raw nerves and festering skin, the light an abrasive thing that was burning him away from the atoms down. He didn't know how he was still cognizant of anything anymore.

Then the horrible, beautiful light swallowed him whole, pulling him down into the deeper, calming darkness, and he no longer cared where he was. Maybe now, he'd be allowed to rest, and hurt no more.


	7. Part 7

8

He seemed to be blind, lost completely in darkness, but there were glimpses of … something in the black surrounding him. Flashes of skin, subtle gem tones like fragments of a prism. But none of this was as vivid as what his other senses were telling him. He could smell her, feel the weight and warmth of her body against him, her skin like silk. He felt her breath against his face, and heard her voice, faint but growing stronger. " … have to go?"

"I will in a minute," he murmured in reply, holding her closer to him, burying his face in her neck. "I'd rather stay with you."

Her lips felt cool against his forehead. "Slacker," she teased. He could fell her fingertips on the back of his neck, stroking his skin.

Mariko. Her name was Mariko. She called him "my tiger" and refused to kill spiders; she usually caught them under cups and let them go outside. She preferred extremely sweet coffee to green tea, and she made him feel loved and wanted - Human. She made him feel like he was really a man, not just a freak. How had he ever forgotten her?

Things shifted, and suddenly he was walking down a long white hallway with lots of anonymous doors, and the strong, rank scent of illness and death choking the air, hiding beneath the sour, cloying smell of antiseptics. It wasn't just a hospital, but the wing where the terminal patients came to die; it wasn't just in the smell but in the general atmosphere in the place. It was as quiet as the grave to come, and funereal in its dark oppression.

He came to the door he wanted and pushed it open, revealing a small private room, lit only by the lights of monitors and a small reading lamp over the bed. There was a woman in it, so slender as to be swallowed by the snow white sheets; her scalp was perfectly bald and gleamed under the dim lights like marble. Her head lolled on the big white pillow, and she opened eyes that were hollow, sunken pits, so dark he couldn't make them out. "So they sent you," she said, her voice raspy and dry. He realized she was speaking French as an afterthought.

He sat heavily in a chair by her bedside, and scooted up close, so he could at least look her in the eye. She was so wasted away, so ravaged by illness, that he barely recognized her anymore, and the sickly sweet smell of cancer eating her away from the inside out was overpowering. "I'm so sorry Juliet." He was speaking her language - it seemed like the least he could do.

"Why? I wish you'd come sooner. Only the cruel bastards at the Organization would keep me alive this long for no point at all."

"They were hoping you could be saved."

She snorted, or at least tried, but it was too weak, and sounded like she was clearing her throat. "Why? I don't even have my powers anymore." She held up one shaking hand, and supposedly tried to trigger her powers, but nothing happened. She let her hand fall limply to the bed. "I'm too weak. It's pathetic."

He grabbed her hand, held it in his, and was shocked by how cold it was. No woman whose power involved becoming a human flamethrower should have ever had ice cold hands. He could feel the small bones beneath her skin, which was as thin as parchment. "I'm sorry this occurred because of a mission I sent you on."

"The Organization sent us all."

"I was in charge."

"No. You and Keogh were both in charge, and I can still remember you two arguing over who went into the base, and how far. He never went in, did he?"

"No. The bastard was too afraid of radiation poisoning. " For good reason, clearly, but he didn't want to give him points for being a coward with no qualms about sending others into peril while he wouldn't go.

"You were burned pretty bad. I remember you spitting out teeth and losing skin in the chopper home."

He shrugged, grimacing at the memory. Teeth _really _hurt when they grew back. "I could take it. I've been dosed with radiation before and survived."

"A shame that's not true for all of us." She said it in a wistful way, not mean or vindictive, but it still made him feel incredibly guilty.

"Juli-"

"How are you going to do this?" she interrupted. Juliet was never much for sentiment; she was as tough as they came, and that's what made her rapid decline to this so shocking. Illness humbled the strongest person.

Inexplicably, he felt tears coming to his eyes, even though he knew this was the most merciful thing he could do. He knew she was in a great deal of pain; he could smell the morphine in her i.v. drip, and yet her pain was great enough to leave her lucid and unaffected by such a heavy narcotic. "I … I have a dose of Toxin's venom. I'm gonna inject it in your i.v. - it should kill you the instant it hits your bloodstream. You probably won't feel it."

She nodded, both agreeing and understanding. "Concentrated, her venom's more toxic than ricin. A good choice."

He blinked back tears, and absolutely hated himself. "I'm so sorry, Juliet. I don't want to -"

"Stop with the apologies, Logan; I don't want them," she said, with a surprising amount of force. "You don't need to convince me there's a good man in there somewhere. We all know that, or you wouldn't have been sent to do this."

That took him by surprise, so much so that he forgot to wipe the tears from his eyes. "What?"

She sighed, and her looking was scolding. "They keep trying to burn it out of you, brainwash it out of you, but it always comes back. I don't know why they refuse to get the hint that you won't permanently conform to their needs. You've done it before, you can do it again."

"Do what?"

"Escape. Go, Logan, before they decide you're a lost cause. Consider it the last request of a dying woman." After a brief pause, she demanded, "Are you going to kill me already or what? Do you know how long I've been waiting? Jesus, do I have to do it myself?"

He almost laughed, but couldn't quite. "Unsentimental 'til the end, huh?"

"Sentimentality is for the weak. And those with functioning bone marrow. Get a move on, before I push you over and get the needle myself."

There was a reason Juliet was considered frightening, beyond the fact that she could light herself on fire and never actually feel it. For a woman of fire, she was always ice cold where it counted, and he was going to miss her. It didn't seem fair that she had to die, but there really was no saving her now. He didn't need to see a medical chart; the rotting smell had overtaken her normal smell, and he could scent the failure of her organs. She had a few days maybe, and all in complete agony.

He patted her hand once more before putting it down, and wiped the tears from his eyes as he took the preloaded hypodermic needle out of his pocket, and found the appropriate nodule in her i.v. tube where they injected medications. "Goodbye, Juliet," he told her, as he plunged the tip in. "Rest in peace …"

Logan jolted awake, his healing factor still making his skin and eyes burn, and it took him a moment to figure out where he was. A night sky showed a hundred bright stars overhead, but it looked like he was viewing them through a veil of gauze. His eyes were still healing, but had enough that he could basically see. Sloane crouched down beside him, and asked, "You okay?"

"Yeah, I think -"

His answer was cut short by her hauling off and slapping him hard across the face. It stung if nothing else, and it was pretty shocking. "Hey! What was that for!"

"For punchin' me, jerk off," she snapped, gesturing at the rather ugly bruise on her temple. But her frown disappeared as she looked around them, and he joined her.

He was laying in the dirt, just beyond a rather large pit, which was maybe a quarter mile across and twice as deep. It took him a moment, but he figured out that's where the base used to be. It wasn't obliterated; it was simply gone. By simple deduction, he figured out he was out where the fence used to be, but wasn't anymore. How did he get here? Did Nova figure out how to teleport him out to relative safety?

"Holy shit," he gasped, not really all that surprised. But he had a feeling that Sloane would expect him to be.

"I know. Nova went off, huh?"

"Nova went off."

"Weird. The thing didn't even explode. There was this … would it sound weird to say a very loud hum?"

"Not at all."

"Okay then, a loud hum, and then a bright flash, and everything was gone. Weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. I thought it got you too, but then I found ya here. " She gave him a slightly sardonic look. "Your luck again, I guess."

"I'm a lucky man," he agreed, his voice dripping with irony.

There was the noise of rotor blades, a helicopter rapidly approaching the scene, but he knew from the engine noise it was one of theirs - their back up far too late to do any good. (Not that they would have shown up on time. How upset were they going to be to know he was still alive?)

"They're gonna hate our report," she said ruefully, eying the hole in the ground where their objective used to be. He grunted an agreement, but didn't otherwise respond.

He had finally figured it out. He didn't know if Nova had somehow helped him or what, but he now knew what Phan had hit him with.

He had been afraid of something without realizing it, and Phan found it; his last act as a living person was to curse him with it.

The truth; he was afraid of the truth. And now that he knew it, there was no going back, no going on as he had been.

But how on Earth did he get himself out of this without killing the few friends he had?

9

There was a greasy spoon in Washington D.C. called Roman's Grill, where the diner looked old fashioned and slightly questionable, with red vinyl booths and chromed napkin holders, a Formica counter and black vinyl swivel stools that had seen better years. It was open very late, until three in the morning, so the clientele could get questionable as the night wore on, and the night cook had a tendency to listen to a station that specialized in old R&B hits, on a radio that was tinny but still could achieve an impressive volume. The place generally smelled of hamburger grease and burnt toast no matter what time it was. And he was terribly fond of it, and ate there whenever he could. Yes, it was in a bad neighborhood, and as a white guy he had a tendency to stand out among most of the customers, but they knew him there and tolerated him - the head waitress, Rosa, would even jokingly flirt with him - and he knew that no one else from the Organization would risk coming here, because there's no way they wouldn't feel conspicuous. It was Logan's variation on hiding in plain sight.

He had finished his first barbeque sandwich - a "specialty" of the house - and since he wasn't sure when he would eat again, he ordered up what they called a "late night scramble": basically scrambled eggs with everything but the kitchen sink tossed into it. It often looked like scrapings from the garbage can, but it tasted great.

Finally Xia came in as the cook turned up the Earth, Wind, and Fire, and she made a face at the cigarette smoke. Most places didn't allow smoking indoors anymore, but at Roman's, no one cared if you lit up or not. Sometimes it covered up the burned meat smell, so he didn't mind so much.

Xia was the loose end he couldn't quite reconcile. She was just a kid still, and he felt responsible for her. He did remember saving her from that "mutant training facility" in China; she was an emaciated waif, exceedingly pale from being kept in the dark for so long (her power fed off UV rays), shaking so much it seemed like she might break into a million pieces. It turned his stomach how they could mistreat a young girl, made infinitely worse by the fact that he was ordered to leave her behind, because Stryker figured she was too frail and ill to be of any use to them. He disobeyed the order, and now every day it must have grated on Stryker to see her, because that sickly girl turned out to have a valuable and enviable power. He had vague recollections of training her, teaching her English, and he thought of her as a sort of daughter, although … something weird had happened to them, hadn't it? He couldn't put his finger on it, but there had been some sort of shift in their relationship. She avoided him a lot, so he couldn't get her to talk about it, although she still felt some tie to him - why else did she call him when she was upset or in trouble?

That's why he knew, when he secretly slipped the note into her coat pocket, telling her to meet him here at eleven thirty, she would come.

She slid into the booth seat across from him, pulling her green corduroy coat around her as if she was cold. She was twenty two now, but she looked barely seventeen; it was heartbreaking, and some instinct in him still wanted to protect her, even though he knew she could take care of herself better than he could. She had an impenetrable force field; he just had claws and a healing factor that wasn't ready to let him die.

He was going to a base called Alkali Lake tomorrow, for what Control called "counterintelligence training" - did he need _more_? Stryker had been giving him a look he didn't trust, and Logan suspected that wasn't what was really going to go down at Alkali Lake, but that was okay. He was going, because it was Canada, Alberta as a point of fact, and he knew he could get lost there so easily. It was winter, for fuck's sake; all he had to do was get to the higher elevations, and they'd be hard pressed to follow him. It would be a perfect and ironic place for him to finally disappear, to shrug off the yoke of the Organization once and for all.

And Xia, surprisingly, was his guilt. He would be leaving her alone with those people, and ever since he'd rescued her, he'd been a fixture in her life, and vice versa. She was an adult now, and she could take care of herself; she was a valuable operative who didn't like to make waves, making her extra special. The Organization saved her from an awful fate in China, and she didn't forget that; they depended on her being grateful, and she never failed to oblige them. But if he was going to abandon her to them, she deserved an explanation.

So he told her, "After I check out Alkali Lake, I'm goin',"

She looked startled, as he expected. "Going? Going where?"

He shrugged, and did a surreptitious scan of the room. "I don't know," he replied, in perfect Cantonese. It was doubtful anyone here could speak Chinese. "But … they took my mind, you see? I've been trying to find out who I am, but … I think they're starting to suspect something. Maybe I said too much to Sloane, I don't know, but I'm starting to feel the noose tighten, you know? I have to get out while I still can."

"They took your mind?"

"They took everything, my whole life," he said, with a breathless laugh. He ran a hand through his hair, and she seemed to realized he was distraught; he could see the surprise in her dark eyes. "I thought I could make them … I thought I could find a way to get it back. But I don't know who I am, Xi. I always wake up thinking I'm some place other than I am, and sometimes I scare myself when I look in a mirror, 'cause I don't recognize myself. I … I can't do this anymore; I can't pretend to be what they want me to be."

"What … why are you telling me this?"

"Because I want you to come with me." He reached across cigarette burned table and put his hand over hers, an avuncular gesture as opposed to a romantic one. "You remind me of someone." And that was true, although he wasn't perfectly certain who. It wasn't Mariko … but he didn't know who it was. Just another frustrating fragment of memory.

She seemed constantly shocked; her eyes were almost comically wide, and he could feel her pulse in her wrist, thumping almost in time with the bass line. "Who?"

"I don't know. But sometimes I look at you, and I think I knew … I knew someone like you, once, a long time ago. And I brought you into this, Xia; I should help you get out."

For a long time she stared at him, her eyes filling with tears, and finally she looked down at the table, grimacing as if in pain. "I can't. I don't want to go out there, into the world."

He squeezed her hand reassuringly. Her whole life had been spent in a Chinese mutant prison, and then the Organization. She'd never been out there on her own, and he couldn't imagine how scary the prospect must have been to her. To him, it sounded like an overdue taste of real freedom. "I'll take care of you," he whispered, reverting to English. He meant it too. She was like his daughter, and he would look after her. God help the organization if they tried to hurt her, because almost nothing else could.

She shook her head violently, not looking at him, and he knew she was trying hard not to cry in front of him. She slipped her hand from beneath his and climbed to her feet, still never looking at him. "I won't come after you," she said, her voice cracking under the strain of holding in the tears. "I'll never find you." She quickly ran out of the diner, and although his first impulse was to run after her, he made himself stay where he was.

She was a good kid; she wouldn't tell anyone of his plans. He felt a twinge of guilt over not telling Sloane - there was no getting around the affection he had for her - but he knew it really wasn't in his best interest to tell her his plans. He finally remembered who her boyfriend was: Control, or as she called him, "Paul". Sloane did like him too, he knew that, but if it came down between him and Control, he would probably lose. It wasn't a theory he was going to test. It was possible he'd been a fool to trust her as much as he had all along.

He knew what he had to do now. He would pretend to be what they wanted, he would be Stryker's dog, until they got up to Alkali Lake, and then he would let go. It was a strange and troubling revelation, but a valuable one, and in retrospect, painfully obvious.

He was insane.

Functionally, anyways. He was fighting himself constantly to seem somewhat normal, to keep a tight reign on his frightening and overwhelming temper and bridge the gaps in his shattered and incomplete mind, but now he was asking himself why.

They wanted him that way. An indiscriminate killing machine, not lucid enough to care about the people he was hurting or why. So why hang on? He would let him go at Alkali Lake, let them have what they wanted, and hope it made them happy … for however long they survived. The flaw in their logic - if you could call it logic - was that it was impossible to control the insane. He knew as soon as he unleashed the beast, it would take down anything between it and freedom. Commands wouldn't work, and telepathy often didn't work on the fractured minds of the insane. They could have what they always wanted, and they could choke on it.

The problem here was he had no idea if he'd ever come back. He wasn't just looking into the abyss of psyche, he was diving in head first, and he had no idea if he'd ever hit bottom. He could be a raving lunatic for the rest of his life. But he had no choice; he could only depend on himself to extricate himself from this lose - lose situation; it was just a damn shame that the part of himself he was trusting to take care of this was something they built, a slavering Mr. Hyde to his Doctor Jekyll. But he healed from everything eventually, right? He had to believe that his healing factor could even heal a fractured mind eventually, given time. 'Beware what you wish for' was a cliché for a very good reason.

He stared out the window, as grimy as it was, and watched the cars driving by on the street. Why would Mirage and Nova, two mutants he killed (well, perhaps not in Nova's case, but he didn't help it at all), help him? He figured it really wasn't a case of them helping him more than it was a case of them getting posthumous revenge on the Organization by robbing them of one of their top level soldiers. But Juliet's words came back to haunt him. _Was_ he a good man? Had he ever been a good man? He honestly didn't know.

But he wanted a chance to find out.

* * *

Epilogue

The first thing he heard was music.

Loud and raucous, strangely intense and tuneful heavy metal in close up, with a familiar sounding singer. Tool? Yes, it was Tool. But there was someone else singing along. "Staring down the hole again, hands upon my back again," Bob shouted along with singer. "Survival is my only friend, terrified of what may come .."

"Do you ever just shut the fuck up?" he groused, opening his eyes and trying hard to remember where he was. The steel ceiling and wall seemed to suggest he was in the medical bay under the mansion. How had he ended up here?

He sat up, scowling, only to find Bob sitting on the edge of a counter, dressed in black leather pants and a Surf Coasters t-shirt, giving him a big shit eating grin. His scruffy brownish blond hair was almost shoulder length now, making him look like a slumming rock star. "I knew if I started singin' along, it'd get you up. Welcome back to the world of the conscious, sleepin' beauty. I bet you gotta pee like a racehorse."

He sat on the edge of his gurney, letting the blanket covering him fall to the floor. How had he ended up here? It took a moment, but he finally remembered: Alkali Lake, Rogue, Saddiq. "Oh shit. Did -"

Bob didn't even let him finish. "Fine and dandy. Your suicidal squeeze play worked beautifully, and you guys have taught these kids well. They can take care of themselves and run a rescue party. Xavier was impressed, after he stopped bein' pissed off."

He dry washed his face, feeling pretty good in spite of the fact that Rogue had just about drained him dry. Of course, did he have any idea how long ago that was? "Did you give me that?" he wondered, referring to his disorienting trip into the past. Could he trust it? Bob could have made something up - he was capable of anything.

"What? The Tool CD? No, that's mine, go buy your own."

He glowered at him, which Bob met with his usual aggressive cheerfulness. He wasn't going to tell him, but Logan felt it was pretty clear - Bob had dredged up a memory for him, or had created one, using the elements he could find. The Powers weren't the only ones with that kind of power. He really didn't know if he should be grateful or angry. "Is that why you're here? To get me up?" He slid down to the floor, which was cool against the soles of his feet, and realized he did indeed have to take a monster piss, but he wasn't about to admit that.

"And get rid of Saddiq's implant, yeah, but I had my own ulterior motive for coming here."

"Don't you always?"

Bob's smile quirked into a smirk, his neon cobalt eyes sparkling. "Well, yeah, but at least I'm admittin' it this time."

He leaned against the edge of the table, weary but still feeling surprisingly rested. Maybe he needed to have a quality near death experience every now and again. Or maybe just a memory that felt solid somehow, not like the remnant of some colossal psychic cluster fuck. "What do you want, Bob?"

"Personally? Nothing. Oh, except you won't remember meetin' Angel as a Human in Dublin; you'll just have a vague recollection of Mordred actin' like an asshole. Okay mate?"

"Huh?" What did he just say? He couldn't quite wrap his mind around it …

"Great. I'm here on behalf of someone who's in trouble and needs your help."

He glared at him. "What the hell am I, a Saint Bernard? You're the god, you help them!"

He turned away, headed for the bathroom, when Bob said something that made him freeze. "It's Angel - he's back. And he needs your help."

Oh fuck. It was always something, wasn't it?

* * *

To Be Continued …. 


End file.
